Shocking response from Facebook about request to remove this offensive page - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/tentspitch/status/338244602735779840 <comment><USER3> I believe this is a result from this campaign: <http://www.womenactionmedia.org/>

I can't get behind this campaign, because a large part of it appears to be advocating censorship of humour.

The face value difference between genuine hate pages and humour is often subtle. But their intentions are completely different. A joke, no matter how crude is not attempting to propagate the idea that rape is acceptable.

Because it's intentions are not to encourage the spread of hatred, it appears the reason they should be removed is because people are offended by them. If you find them offensive, don't view them. And I think it's pretty easy not to view those images unless you go looking for them.

Here's the campaigns 'examples' page: <http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/examples/>

There is a clear overlap between the jokes, and what I would consider hateful. The majority appear to be bad jokes, and the supporters of the campaign often (understandably) find it difficult to differentiate between the two.

I can't support censorship of humour, no matter how offended I am by it. The campaign in my view has failed because it has not clearly defined it's boundaries, it's going to war with genuine hate pages and bad jokes at the same time and is causing a lot of confusion in the process.

<comment><USER4> I clicked through that examples page you linked, and I disagree with you about what these jokes are. Jokes need to be funny, there is very little humor in "This bitch didn't know when to shut up. Do you?"

I agree with you about not censoring jokes, but seriously.. these are not the kind of jokes that are worth the time spent looking at them. Would a picture of your face with blood with the tag line "Tom Gullen didn't know when to shut up." be a joke? I think not.

<comment><USER3> > Jokes need to be funny

No they don't, humour is not objective. Regardless of how distasteful a joke is, it's intentions are not to incite violent acts. So the only casualty is how offended you are by them. If they are offensive, simply don't view them which is very easy to do.

> Would a picture of your face with blood with the tag line "Tom Gullen didn't > know when to shut up." be a joke? I think not.

Honestly I might find it funny, it depends on who executed it, how it was executed and how it was presented. It would be hard to execute in such a way where I would find it funny, but it's definitely possible.

Either way I don't think your example is very good. Your presenting an example of targeting a named individual, and what's actually going on is most of the 'humour' images are targeting demographics.

A better example would be a picture of a bloodied man with the caption "He still hasn't mowed the lawn" or whatever. I would probably chuckle because the image was so bizarre but I don't think it should be censored.

<comment><USER5> Whenever I hear people try to argue that certain jokes "aren't funny" and therefore shouldn't be permitted, I get the urge to ask them what they think of postmodern art. I've learned from asking that most people don't hold consistent positions.

About 100 years ago when Duchamp put a urinal on display and titled it _Fountain_ , you bet people were screaming "that's not art!" And that was just the beginning.

There's anti-art and anti-jokes. There's institutional critiques, inside jokes, and meta-humor. It's not all appropriate, and it's not all good.

The rule is: if you don't get it, then it's not for you.

<comment><USER3> Paradoxically I find purposefully unfunny jokes to be some of the funniest

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this was an excellent response from Facebook. I don't agree with the message, but I also don't want to increase censorship just because I don't like what others are saying.

<comment><USER7> I strongly disagree with you. How is encouragement to rape ever acceptable?

<comment><USER8> It's not "acceptable". It's horrible. It's despicable. It's disgusting - <USER2> the person who posted that picture, and created that picture, should be ashamed of themselves. Absolutely no reasonable person believes, for even a second, that that posting shouldn't be taken down, and immediately, and the person who put it up should also immediately apologize.

The question, that is being posed, is whether Facebook should be taking down these horrible, despicable, and disgusting pictures without consent of the original poster.

I'm pretty pro-censorship and government control over what people are allowed to post, and see - so I would say, "Yes. Take it down." There are those who are more pro-free speech, who would say, "No, Facebook should not be arbitrarily censoring these images. Leave it up."

But - I can certainly understand both sides of the argument.

[Edit - For those who believe that Facebook should remove that article, read through <https://twitter.com/sammorril>, and consider whether you believe twitter should be censoring his posts, for example, <https://twitter.com/sammorril/status/307191599543234560> is one that I reasonably think should be erased by Twitter on the same grounds that the Facebook posting should be erased by Facebook. There's lots of offensive humor that I'm fine with being censored/removed. Your position on this topic doesn't necessarily reflect whether you believe the views being posted are acceptable, but more-so whether you believe central bodies should be arbitrarily dictating what others are allowed to post, and see, and how frequent, and under what circumstances that power to censor should be used.)

<comment><USER9> You're wrong: there can be no arguments about pro-censorship or pro-free speech regarding this picture. As mentioned right in Facebook's reply, they _already_ censor content according to their guidelines. The argument is about whether this picture is "bad" enough to censor it.

<comment><USER8> The reason why it's a pro-censorship vs pro-free speech argument, is that almost everyone (for any reasonable definition of everyone) believes in some censorship in a civilized society.

The real question then, is not whether censorship should take place, but where the "line" should be drawn. Depending on your feelings regarding censorship, you may believe that crude and objective jokes that you find offensive should, or should not be censored. Depending on their content, I think they should. Those who are more free-speech leaning than I am may state that they are offended by that speech, but defend the person who is making the offensive speech their right to make it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think that can even be considered humour, but I also disagree that the image is "hate speech". Women are not the exclusive victims of rape in any sense. Ridiculously stupid and unfunny? Yes. Putting down women for being women? I don't think so.

<comment><USER11> > Women are not the exclusive victims of rape.

This is a ridiculously weak argument.

According to RAINN, 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, and the majority of male victims are either prisoners or children, which is another whole class of crime in itself.

What is being proposed by the photo (joking or not) is rape against women, pure and simple. And we have a worldwide epidemic: 1 in 6 women will be victimized in their lifetime.

Maybe the majority of HN readers are too young or socially isolated to have a close relationship with a woman who has been a victim. But when you see what it does to real human beings, then it's hard to be so damn callous about this.

<comment><USER12> The oft-repeated RAINN data is suspect and based on questionable statistics and speculations. It is certainly not derived from actual criminal reporting data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here[0] is where Facebook defines what they consider to be "hate speech":

> Content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, > ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, > disability or disease is not allowed. We do, however, allow clear attempts > at humor or satire that might otherwise be considered a possible threat or > attack. This includes content that many people may find to be in bad taste > (ex: jokes, stand-up comedy, popular song lyrics, etc.).

Granted, it's a horribly distasteful image macro, but Facebook acted according to their written community standards, so I'm not sure why their response is "shocking". It's also important to bear in mind that the page is titled " _Offensive_ Humor at its Best", so I'm not sure why it comes as a surprise that the images are, well, _offensive_.

[0] <https://www.facebook.com/help/135402139904490/>

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree encouraging rape is not acceptable. Neither is racism. Or disrespecting other people. But we have decided that it is better to have freedom of speech than no freedom of speech. Is Facebook's response in the right? I think so. We should be angry at the person who put up the photo.

</comment><comment><USER15> So there is something offensive on page called offensive humor at its best ... surprise.

Now here is the thing with humor and offensiveness = with 7 billion people on this planet everything is offensive to someone. Also funny to someone else.

This is a stupid joke - ignore it. If it got shared by a friend defriend him. If it got promoted to you by facebook sponsored - file a complaing. But trawling on pages for finding something to be offended by - it is way too close to censorship in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER16> I offer this as a thought experiment for people on both sides of the debate:

Is it acceptable to shout "Fire!" in a panic-stricken manner in a crowded theater?

If not, then you accept that there are circumstances when "free speech" is not applicable. If so, please defend your position, when such an act may lead almost directly to serious injury and perhaps death.

This question removes the connection with rape and perhaps might help to focus attention on "speech with consequences".

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's offensive, yes, it's disgusting, but how exactly does it "have consequences"? Do you really think someone is going to go rape a woman just because of this tasteless rhyme? That's ridiculous.

<comment><USER16> Do you think speech like this has no consequences at all? That's what I'm trying to find out, whether people believe this sort of thing genuinely has zero effect.

Personally, I think speech and communication in general goes both ways. It reflects what the source thinks and feels, and in turn affects what the listener/reader thinks and feels. I think there is an effect.

Do you think there is none?

And then there is the other aspect. Do you believe that speech with consequences should be censored or controlled? Or do you believe that all speech, even shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, should be uncensored and uncontrolled? You appear not to have answered the question I actually asked.

<comment><USER18> All speech has an effect otherwise no one would bother talking. The question is not whether it has an effect, but whether it causes enough harm to justify stopping it. Older than the fire in the theater example (which if I remember rightly comes from a supreme court case in the US) is John Stuart Mill:

>An opinion that corndealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

But he then of course gives one of the most brilliant defenses of free speech in all circumstances other than direct harm ever written. Do you think this is going to cause direct harm?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm just wondering how you come across such a picture on Facebook in the first place. I imagine you have to go looking for it, considering it's in the group "Offensive Humor at Its Best," which I doubt anyone would share with their friends.

The picture was posted on February 12th [1], but she didn't report it until about an hour ago [2], which only adds to the evidence that she went out of her way to find this.

So my question is: why would you do this if it's going to ruin your day?

There's bad stuff all over the internet, and it's not going away. It doesn't seem productive to launch a crusade to get it all taken down. Just block it if you don't want to see -- get some filtering software, install parental controls.

I really hope no one tells or about 4chan or tor.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&set=168467446611226)

[2] [http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&s...](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&set=a.168468706611100.13857.168467446611226&type=1&comment_id=253779&offset=0&total_comments=11)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think context matters a lot, and this photo was posted to a page called "Offensive Humor" so people know the message is wrong and offensive, I doubt anyone would actually be on that page seriously agreeing with that message or being influenced to carry out its message. If this was posted to a page called "Women are scum" or similar etc then the photo would have a different meaning.

</comment><comment><USER20> WTF facebook? Encouragement of rape is not acceptable IMHO.

<comment> SG- It's not encouragement, it's someone's attempt at a joke. It's ok to joke about things, and sometimes it's offensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess a would make that a gender issue since it's mostly women who are target of rape jokes.

The real craziness is this insistance in removing any female nipples (for some reason, male nipples are not sensored) and not dead corpses or guns even in countries where nudity is far more accepted than violence.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you get pissed by what you find online, then you're better off the Internet.

<comment><USER22> I strongly believe that people which complains about the content of Internet, whatever it might be, should go trough "internet 101": <https://encyclopediadramatica.se/The_Power_5>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great response from facebook. I prefer that nothing visual be censored. People should just ignore shit that is offensive to them. And we as a society should just look down on people who create offensive shit.

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook took a while to decide that videos of women having their heads cut off were not acceptable.

I don't find Facebook's decision here confusing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Fuck censorship. Depictions of violence are not violence.

Movies, porn, video games. Do they encourage shooting people in the head? Not in real life.</comment>


Show HN: A Fun Crypto Game - <AUTHOR> http://frederic.vanderessen.com/puzzle <comment><AUTHOR> This was supposed to be a simple challenge for new employees, but despite the simplicity of the solution, it was way too hard to find... I'm interested to see if HN can crack it :) I'll throw an extra hint : The message is readable in absolutely every web browser. But not if you are using Tor.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The reddit thread is alive with a lot more hints and nobody found it yet ... [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2fwlgv/a_fun_cr...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2fwlgv/a_fun_crypto_puzzle/)</comment>


Increasing Rust's Reach - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/06/27/Increasing-Rusts-Reach.html <comment><USER2> > But there's a bit of a bootstrapping problem here: if we want to reach new > people, we can't do it by relying solely on the skills and perspectives of > our existing community.

Cool, so they are looking to make Rust more useful by involving people with different perspectives.

> we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), > nonbinary folks, people of color

Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective _Edit: explained in a comment[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657507) by wll_

> non-native English speakers, people who learned programming later in life > (older, or only in college, or at a bootcamp as part of a midlife career > change), people with disabilities, or people who have different learning > styles.

Ah yes. This is what I expected to see.

I'm loving what Rust is currently bringing and is going to bring to the world, I want them to be really approachable, and I want it to be used in new ways - but it really reads like they are playing with going the way of Github.

EDIT: See earlier edit.

<comment><USER3> > _Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of > relevant skills and perspective_

The effort to reach underrepresented demographics seems to stem from last year's survey results [0]. Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life- experience-based heterogeneity.

[0] [https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/06/30/State-of-Rust- Survey-2...](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/06/30/State-of-Rust- Survey-2016.html#survey-demographics)

<comment><USER4> I see it as a way of investigating possible unconscious bias or even hostility towards minorities in the Rust developer community - from easily fixable things such as male-bias in documentation (e.g. examples using male pronouns disproportionately) - to vitriolic sexist and other abuse in chat and forum groups.

Fortunately the Rust community isn't GamerGate, but if we can eliminate those attitudes sooner, then that's in Rust's long-term interests.

<comment><USER5> Considering the vast majority of programmers are male, does it really matter if we use male pronouns. What does changing them actually solve? Are women really put off of computing because of that? It all seems so trivial.

<comment><USER6> Many small trivial things can add up. Also, if we cater to the status quo ("the vast majority of programmers"), the status quo is less likely to change.

<comment><USER7> Why is the status quo a problem?

I'm not saying it isn't; I don't know. I just don't see why should we assume that it _is_.

<comment><USER8> Because you don't benefit from half of your population if you only teach men to code. The same applies to other minorities. Of course it is essential that we can get everyone to code so that everyone can contribute in the future when a lot of work will require coding skills.

<comment><USER9> I don't know any good programmers who were taught.

<comment><USER10> I would rather say: I don't know any good programmers who weren't self-taught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am really not interested in your current US obsession with identity politics.

I care for a well designed, well performing language, which Rust appears to be.

I could not care less about what is the colour of people writing it, their sexual orientations, or how well represented they all are. It may seem relevant to you but it certainly is not to me.

I don't even know what cis women are or are supposed to be. Are they good designers and programmers?

<comment><USER12> >I could not care less about what is the colour of people writing it, their sexual orientations, or how well represented they all are. It may seem relevant to you but it certainly is not to me.

Well, you can certainly ignore all that and just use the language. Nothing forces you to do these things, they're just forcing _themselves_ to do these things.

<comment><USER13> It's a small faction of people that self identify as cissomething. Much of modern cultural discussions _are_ about language: what is "marriage" for instance, what does "gender" mean, what is "racist", what is "privilege". Asking people to give up and use someone else's language is unfair. In different ways respectable thinkers like Orwell and Chomsky say language is very important.

And I think the position being espoused but misunderstood is that people would _like_ to take different approaches to promoting diversity (perhaps by being personally inclusive and politically neutral) but these sorts of codes of conduct are not conducive to those approach. It's not fair to say this is _the_ way to improve the situation. Or that the situation _can_ be improved this way at all. It may be shocking to people comfortable in American coastal culture, but this sort of thing is controversial (look at this thread!) and unnecessarily combative to people from other cultures.

Furthermore, it's _not_ inclusive to many people because it takes a specific viewpoint in many complicated but intentional ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is Rust gaining any traction for system-level programming? When I heard that there was now a memory-safe thread-safe language without a GC, my immediate thought was "Every OS from now on should be written in this thing".

<comment><USER15> Slow and steady, certainly this won't happen overnight.

There is Redox, for the full-on ambitious plan to write an OS from scratch: [https://www.redox-os.org](https://www.redox-os.org)

Then there's the Rust rewrite of coreutils: [https://github.com/uutils/coreutils](https://github.com/uutils/coreutils)

Someone also did the research on building a Linux kernel module in Rust, though it seems like quite the hassle: [https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko](https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko)

<comment><USER16> Do you know of any discussion of rewriting parts of existing micro-kernels in Rust? There's lots of nuts and bolts details I don't know, but it seems like having OS components as separate services/processes would provide a nice way to start phasing out C/C++ and phasing in Rust.

<comment><USER15> I haven't seen anything like that, but I also rarely see microkernels in the wild. I'm not even sure if Rust runs on MINIX at all.

<comment><USER17> You can do Rust + rumprun today, or at least, it worked in the past.

<comment><USER18> I can confirm that this works, with some effort, for some Rust programs packaged as rumprun unikernels targeting seL4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Data wise: According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, Rust is the language that women are the least interested in.

Any thoughts on why?

      Row	WantWorkLanguage	responses	perc_female
      1	R	2477	11.87%
      2	Ruby	3743	11.03%
      3	Java	9409	8.42%
      4	Python	11878	8.22%
      5	SQL	10646	7.81%
      6	Scala	2972	7.64%
      7	JS	15451	7.37%
      8	Swift	4282	7.36%
      9	PHP	5039	7.22%
      10	C#	9640	6.21%
      11	C++	7178	5.20%
      12	Go	5500	4.87%
      13	C	4536	4.83%
      14	TypeScr	5435	4.51%
      15	Haskell	2208	4.35%
      16	Rust	2604	3.38%

(related thread: [https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/879806078866776064](https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/879806078866776064))

      SELECT WantWorkLanguage, COUNT(*) responses, FORMAT('%.2f%%', 100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*)) perc_female
      FROM (
        SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ')  WantWorkLanguage, Gender v
        FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017`
        WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA'
      ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage
      GROUP BY 1
      HAVING responses>2000
      ORDER BY COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*) DESC

<comment><USER20> Without a comparison to men, this is pretty hard to make judgements based on. For all I know from that data, there might be an even lower interest level among men for Rust.

<comment><USER19> The % is indeed a comparison to men.

(Of all respondents interested in Rust, only 3% are women. Compare with R 12%, and Ruby 11%)

<comment><USER20> Ah, okay, I didn't realize that; that changes my view on it quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Focus on getting the printed books into bookstores and onto Amazon. Most are still stuck at "pre-order". Get someone who is _not_ on the developer team or a fanboy to write a good Rust book. (Yes, there's "Rust Essentials", but from Amazon reviews, it's a thrown-together set of introductory material that just refers you back to the Rust web site.)

Go had this problem in the early days. The early materials were totally uncritical, or in denial of, of Go's weaknesses. Things have improved; now the problems and limitations are better understood. Now people understand that shared data should be protected by ordinary mutexes, rather than using message passing of dummy messages as a locking system. Newer materials reflect this.

<comment><USER17> There are two that should hit print + Amazon this year, [https://www.nostarch.com/Rust](https://www.nostarch.com/Rust) (mine) and [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are you implying that Rust should be the first programming language of these minority groups? Given the complexity of low level programming that doesn't sound like a good idea. If that is not your plan then this is a pointless exercise. The cohort of existing programmers is highly biased in these same ways. The bigger Rust gets the more difficult it will be to maintain anything far from the average. If rust becomes as popular as say Java or C++ it will be statistically impossible to maintain anything but the average within the community.

<comment><USER17> > Are you implying that Rust should be the first programming language of these > minority groups?

No.

<comment><USER22> Did you read the rest? I appreciate a reply from the core team but you must understand your potential audience of Rust users is a highly gender/racial biased cohort. If Rust becomes popular it will become near impossible to deviate from the mean unless you engage in affirmative action by selectively removing community members in the majority.

Edit: I'm not against these kinds of initiatives at all, I just don't think it's realistic to apply such goals to a free-form group of programming language users.

<comment><USER17> > Did you read the rest?

I did, but I disagree. You're making a large assumption, which is that the group will follow the demographic average. This is not true; individual programming languages' demographics differ from the overall population.

And there's certainly no desire to "remove" anyone, selectively or not. It's about growing the pie, not placing artificial limits.

Also, this initiative is not about people new to programming overall, it's about experienced people who may not know Rust or haven't found a way to get involved with Rust as a project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Improving the experience on Windows might increase reach as well. Reading this thread, there appear to be some issues: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238)

Specifically, openssl dependencies, more win32 bindings, and better official docs on how to get it working.

<comment><USER17> This is very much on our radar; I use Windows as my primary OS now, even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am really stoked to see Tango on here. I maintain that literate programming is actually a good idea. The nice thing about Tango is you can work either on the code file or the markdown file and it will automatically synchronize them, and it integrates with cargo. I would love to see Tango be mature and widely used.

<comment><USER25> Just got into rust a couple weeks ago - thanks for pointing out Tango. Had no idea what it was until it finally clicked. Pretty awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Embedded ... embedded ... embedded.

Getting Rust to the point where it is _better_ than C on embedded systems is both feasible (C on embedded sucks on a good day) and would pay off hugely.

<comment><USER17> This is a very active area of work.

<comment><USER26> I have been tracking it quite strongly. My big problem currently isn't using it; my big problem is that others can't read it.

So, a work problem to use it needs to be 1) resource constrained and 2) limited programming scope so only I have to deal with it. 1) is easy. 2), not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "We have a team of Rust community leaders to pair you with. This group isn't particularly diverse; this is where the Rust community is right now. "

That's where it's been since the beginning. All the politics, Coraline's Code of Conduct, moderation, talk of "inclusiveness," and so on with "social justice" advocates in or leading some teams. You'd think the teams themselves would be diverse as heck with the community following. Yet, those in control from the beginning up to now are mostly young, white males on almost every team in the pictures.

[https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html](https://www.rust-lang.org/en- US/team.html)

Reminds me a bit of the Huffington Post pic on Twitter showing a bunch of mostly white women running a company whose writers talk lots about how companies should be inclusive and/or diverse without actually practicing it.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington...](https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington_post_tweet_fail/)

Both showed structural racism, sexism, and age discrimination exist at the management (esp hiring) level. No surprise that the resulting community wasn't diverse enough in practice when those leading it weren't. One tends to follow the other. There's a bootstrapping requirement of sorts where having internal diversity helps ensure it in the areas they act on (eg communities). It's not there... probably intentionally as some other organizations actively sought out different kinds of people in hiring with either quotas or blind auditions. I could see specific positions in language or compiler teams getting white males or something narrow due to prevalence among top teams in CompSci. However, many jobs on this list don't take a genius so much as someone willing to learn and work. More typical kind of work that both majority and minority talent exists and can handle.

Like in the tweeted reply to Huffington, I suggest the Rust team can begin improving diversity by looking to see if there's a handful of black people in their geographical area or working remotely if allowed that are capable of writing code, writing docs, talking to people online about the language, doing CI, moderating away mean posts, and other things I see in team descriptions. I swear I've seen and met such people doing such jobs in the past in person and online. _If_ they're in Mountain View with Mozilla, Wikipedia tells me that area is over 50% non-white with lots of Latinos and Asians. A lot of women live out there, too. If I'm wrong about the structural discrimination, then none of them can code, write, admin, or assist people and/or they're not in the pipeline somehow with hiring having no way to look for them. Outside the small amount on the Rust team already that are minority members. Call me skeptical that the talent for average work didn't exist or was too hard to find.

<comment><USER17> To be clear, your last paragraph (EDIT: now removed) weirdly conflates Rust with Mozilla; only one person on Rust teams live in Mountain View, many (most?) people on the teams are not Mozilla employees, and this isn't about Mozilla hiring people.

Your observation about the current makeup is in fact what we would like to change, and your suggestion to reach out to people is what this post is intended to do.

<comment><USER27> The first bit is useful information. It means you had a ton of minority talent to draw on instead of one location and company. The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. That was the point of the critique. I'll throw out some suggestions, though, instead of just critiquing as my own principles are about helping a project that's doing important good work. Regardless of diversity issues, I still congratulate you people on that and hope you continue to improve across the board. :)

There's two easy ones that you can do on the team side and _maybe_ in some form on the community side. You and the others are simply more knowledgeable at working with communities so I leave it to you to find what applies. Here they are:

1\. Supply side. Talk to people doing these bootcamps, conferences, and so on focusing on minorities in general or specific minority groups. They probably know people in the demographic who can code well. Send people there to talk about Rust like you seem to do in general at conferences and such. Also, invite all in these groups to send in references or Githubs relevant to specific jobs. Give them resources to learn it. Get those that want to get a job or place in the community to get on the forums for help learning and/or submitting code/docs. Encourage, but don't require, them to do it _blind_ under an alias with no info on race/age/gender. Without biases limiting them and with increasing supply, the percentage of minority talent should increase naturally.

2\. Quota side. Do something like that plus ads for talent in general. Get a supply of people from many backgrounds with some way to evaluate whether they are capable of performing the role. They all "earned" their place rather than just token hires since each seems to be a decent or good hire. The "best" of all programmers is pretty subjective concept with strong possibility of bias anyway. Then, do quotas for the hiring slots with those brought in chosen randomly with right spread or best rated of each group. A lot of the local businesses out here are, despite the South's racial issues, quote diverse even up to a layer or two of management by just (a) hiring anyone who might be able to do the job, (b) giving them some training/coaching, and (c) keeping those that perform well. Works wonders but I mention other things first since there's few jobs to go around at high cost on your end.

Have fun with those.

EDIT: Fix two deficiencies at top I saw.

<comment><USER17> > The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without > actually doing it or not many on team cared as much.

This is _extremely_ not true. We have actively cared about this for a long time, and we've been doing work towards it basically forever, with some progress. This is the latest effort. There is no silver bullet.

<comment><USER27> All you'd have to do is get a large list of people in minorities who did work similar to each of the jobs you'd need to do. At least a handful for each one but preferably more if you had time. Then, send them detailed offers with follow-up interviews to see if they could perform. You'd have more of them on your team afterward.

Did you all do that? And do you have any data on it so interested outsiders can see what caused the failures and how to prevent that in the future?

<comment><USER28> Based on your use of the words jobs, offers, interviews, etc it sounds like you're assuming that being on a Rust team is a paid job. This is not the case. Mozilla indeed employs a lot of the people on the teams, but I have my own company, for example. I do not get paid because of my membership on the teams. And there are people who work on Rust at Mozilla who are not on the teams; these are a disjoint set.

<comment><USER27> That's indeed news to me. The press releases had me assuming otherwise. I appreciate you and Steve telling me so I can get better accuracy in future conversations. What's the split of paid people to volunteers on the page I linked? Especially in compiler, language, library, and community teams?

<comment><USER17> Out of almost 60 distinct people, roughly 15 are employed by Mozilla by my quick count. It gets a bit fuzzy because some people have done things like been an intern, did a few months on contract, or something else, but that's the current count.

<comment><USER27> Well, it's cool you have so many volunteers. Also, the lack of diversity isn't as bad as it initially appeared if we're including volunteers. There could be bias but donating time/money for good things must be a good thing by default. :) The critiques would only still apply on hiring level if the 15 were mostly white males in circumstances where more minorities could've been hired. Any suggestions or brainstorming would also still apply since they address the supply or acceptance side rather than just Rust specifically. It's just one instance where the techniques can benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Huh, I thought the Rust team includes front-enders and how Rust websites look is a purely stylistic choice.</comment>


Haskell Success Stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/04/haskell-success-stories <comment><USER2> Perhaps it would be better titled "Call for Haskell success stories".</comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't there HTTP style standards for invoicing things? - <AUTHOR> I manage expenses for my company on an AMEX card. People I work with that want to expense something over X amount come get my card, make the purchase, return the card and forward the invoice. Each invoice is a unique snowflake. Some contain data that can be scraped, others direct to you a website which may or may not be able to be scraped. Design changes break the scrapers. They may or may not support a billing email and if not, things get even more muddled.
The same fragility problem that REST solved remains running rampant in how businesses invoice each other.
What if each business allowed you to provide an end point to which they would POST when an invoice dropped, using a free and open standard? Wouldn't this cut an accounting departments' head count down significantly?
The lack of adoption to take seems like the answer to my question...
As a SaaS business, why would I build an end point when I can sign up for recurly or similar and just auto email invoices?
As a small business receiving invoices, this is something that takes 20 minutes a week to type in.
As a medium to large business, it gets to the point where I have 50 invoice scraping scripts and am feeling the pain. I guess at this point the answer is to "hiring another book keeper" but it bugs me that an open standard and a simple POST would automate the whole shooting match.
Are other businesses doing this "right" in a way I've missed? Is there an opportunity here for software to eat a bit more of the world? Perhaps simply publish an open source standard and see if people run with it?
[EDIT: Tried to use less words to explain the problem] <comment><USER2> EDI, it's old and crusty and expensive and annoying because all of the current software out there is crap but it solves this for companies as big as WalMart down to your local Mom and Pop corner store. I have a pretty good idea how to fix this but have other commitments at the moment. Too many ideas not enough time. A PO is the 850 document standard in EDI and the invoice is the 810 in EDI.

<comment><USER3> I'm getting the feeling this is the thread to figure out who the old folks are.

Yep, EDI is cranky and a pain, but there is a lot of expertise out there and some of the software is not totally heinous (unless we are talking health information via EDI, then it all sucks and you might have to learn MUMPS / M). There are standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ANSWER TO YOUR GENERALISED QUESTION:

cXML [http://cxml.org/](http://cxml.org/) , OCI and EDI (mentioned above) are alive and well and commonly used for large corporates to deal with their suppliers without paper.

cXML (or even OCI) for the purchase order stage and EDI for the invoice stage is a typical setup.

ANSWER FOR YOUR SPECIFIC ISSUE:

The reason this doesn't and will never exist is that every business is different - you're essentially dealing with people like Joe Bloggs not standardised processes like HTTP. However, help is at hand:

[https://www.receipt-bank.com/](https://www.receipt-bank.com/) \- they take your email and paper invoices in any format, scan them, key in the data and inject it straight into your accounts system (or at least let you grab a spreadsheet).

</comment><comment><USER5> Short answer there are, look up EDI Electronic data interchange which has been going longer than some HN commentators have been alive

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange)

EDI was live back in the early 80's in the UK

<comment><USER6> And it's still alive now and still a fucking arse pain. We have to import statements from various large financial companies and they still even after 20-odd years haven't worked out how to make parseable CSVs and don't even get me started on encoding which usually consists of concatenated bits of crap in multiple encodings. Oh and some of it even arrives via modem (at 9600bps no less!). If we're lucky we get SFTP and UTF8 XML without a broken schema. Some of the XML is actually just made by concatenating unescaped strings which explodes when someone puts a double quote in a text field.

Imagine debugging that heap of shite.

Resolving problems with it does pay very well though, which is what I'm doing now at 23:25 on a Sunday night :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well there is a bunch of standards aimed at this, already mentioned are EDI and cXML. But another very ambitious is Oasis' UBL. In Denmark and a few other european countries you basically have to support invoicing in UBL (Or more specifically the danish subset OIOUBL or scandinavian subset NESUBL) if you want to do business with government as it is a requirement.[1] In a transition-phase (which i don't know if still is ongoing) suppliers could send invoices to a "scanning agency" that would attempt to convert the invoice to OIOUBL and send on to the government institution.

This has pushed adoption of these things in Denmark quite a bit and we see a lot of big corporations demanding of their suppliers that they support these formats.

Edit: [1] Previous to OIOUBL danish government had its own format called OIOXML: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML)

</comment><comment><USER8> There are to many conflicting standards for this. Most of them are calling themself some 'EDI', even those that are not based on X12. X12 itself is not human readable, and EDI based on X12 (Tradacom, US EDI, UN/EDIFACT) are complex beasts. To complex for average coders. So those coders invent new standards e.g. for SAP, or OASIS.

imho, the solution would be UN/EDIFACT. The United Nations version is flexible enough to cover 99% of the real life cases, and improves twice a year, to cover the remaining percent.

Take a look at my XML::Edifact CPAN Perl modules, if you want to start with free software EDI.

Now EDI is only half of the bill. EDI would be the HTML part of the Web of business documents. But you also need a transport part, and the EDI networks are not connected, as they speak different languages. And you need some open servers and browsers for your EDI.

</comment><comment><USER9> payswarm is building monetary & transactional schemas/data-models. they have json-ld underneath, and jsonld has some interop with RDFa if you want the other declarative content format (html). [https://payswarm.com/specs/](https://payswarm.com/specs/) [http://digitalbazaar.com/payswarm/](http://digitalbazaar.com/payswarm/)

i'm less familiar with the other ideas floating in the Web Payments working group, whose charter is to chart the standards serving what you describe. [http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/](http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Adoption seems like the answer to my question."

Established legacy process that is working. Also as noted people spend money and give effort to make money I don't think this is a big enough pain point in terms of saving money.

In order to make this happen you would have to start by convincing (say) Walmart that it was good for them. Then they would force it down the throats of their vendors. Believe that happened with bar codes. I remember doing a job for a small business that was a Walmart vendor and needed bar codes (this was a long time ago the early 90's) in order to ship an order.

That said your writeup isn't that clear in stating the problem. I had to read it twice to understand what you were asking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about being unclear. It was more of a rant in the form of a question.

I don't think this would be a walmart down thing but instead a "the valley out" thing - kind of like REST and APIs are today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The people who built the Danish e-invoicing solution are called Tradeshift and have a solution which follows open standards. They've also recently added cloud scanning. If you're a corporate you can buy access for your suppliers to email pdfs to Tradeshift - and the magic is the supplier gets an email back asking them to validate the data. And emails telling them how much easier it would be to submit electronically in the first place. Much more elegant than the payment networks which charge the supplier a flat fee to submit an invoice.

<comment><USER12> [http://tradeshift.com/invoicing/](http://tradeshift.com/invoicing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you sure there are no such standards? I mean - in Czech Republic we have de facto standard called ISDOC XML(which should be based on other international standard UBL (universal bussines language, or smtg. like that)). All major accounting/finance software support it and yet, nobody uses it (at least those I have to deal with). I couldn't even convince my ISP to send me these files. Maybe you should check current options and then require them from your vendors.

</comment><comment><USER14> Part of the problem is that problem domain for small businesses doesn't look the domain for large businesses.

For one thing, large businesses often have to deal with multiple country rules.

All my invoices are issued to Australians, at the moment (though I'm open to invoicing others, hint hint). So it's fairly straightforward; my invoice template includes the legal requirements of an ABN, business number, the words "Tax Invoice", an identifying number and prices with and without tax.

If I bill in other countries, I might need another template.

If I bill in a pile of other countries, then any universal system has to account for per-country variations in an abstract, generalisable way.

But abstract, generalised ways of doing things obscure the concrete case. Instead of thinking in local terms, I have to learn the generic term and then understand how it will map to my particular problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> Even if you support consuming UBL or an other HTTP like format or anything really, tracking expenses will continue to be a Hard Problem (tm).

I ran expenses for a fairly large producing organization this summer. I got large stacks of unorganized and under-descriptive receipts every day. Including receipts from flea markets, amish bakeries, and more. Not to mention PO purchases, check requests, petty cash withdrawals, partial returns, returns to cash, and more.

No matter what, more than an automaton, you need someone who understands the business process. You need someone who can look at a receipt and not only know how much was spent and on what SKU, but what that actually item is for, and if it's a valid expense.

</comment><comment><USER16> It is important to have a contact who will make sure that invoices are approved and get paid in a reasonable time. If not they have a tendency to go missing. The important thing is tracking what has been authorized for payment. Without solving that a protocol would risk being just another black hole where unpaid invoices languish.

Instead build something that tracks approved invoices. When an invoice is approved the vendor gets an email asking them to fill in a form, entering all the data from the invoice. Include a big "pay me" button at the bottom. Don't make the payment until the data is provided.

</comment><comment><USER17> No HTTP style standard, but a XML standard [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Business_Language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Business_Language)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is something that has ramifications everywhere. For example it drives me nuts that I get handed pieces of paper with every purchase but stuffed if a supermarket till will mail me a reciept. Want to drive adoption of reward cards(+) at your supermarket? Allow every holder to get downloads of their spends. Now hook that in for all your partner orgs. We will happily throw away out privacy for that !

(+) and for the love of Zeus, stop calling it a loyalty card. I am loyal to family, friends and the Queen. Your coffee shop does not even rank.

<comment><USER19> The term "loyalty card" is descriptive, the goal of the card is to increase your loyalty to the store by targeted marketing.

I'm surprised that your supermarket actually uses that name because it should twig anyone who thinks about it that something ain't quite right. The stores I know all call them discount cards.

<comment><USER18> Try Costa Coffee, The poor serving staff are so used to "do you have your loyalty card?", its like a tape playing.

Sadly I am loyal, like a heroin addict is loyal to his dealer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've worked on this problem for the past ten years. The solution would be to build line item data into the payment networks according to one standard or another. Unfortunately, the established payments companies have prevented startups (such as mine) from doing so because it's not worth it to them. They make a fortune from their existing, aging infrastructure. So we're stuck with the old networks until the courts fix the mess of unconstitutional laws they've set up to guard their profits.

<comment><USER21> Line item data is the holy grail for a number of players in the payment space. The merchants are understandably guarded about sharing this information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is going to be invoicing protocol in the next Bitcoin version. Let's see what kind that will be.

Other than that, money before Bitcoin has never been a communication protocol, but a centralized database where the database keepers benefit from network effects & locking in the customer to that specific database. So it is pretty obvious IMHO that no good protocols have been developed around it.

</comment><comment><USER23> What if you use MailGun or Sendgrid to receive forwarded email, then use your scripts to parse the invoices customers forward you, and offer the data back in various formats like Excel, Quickbooks, and JSON?

I would pay $30/month for that. Even better if you wrote a Context.io filter to automatically start forwarding invoice-looking things to your system.

</comment><comment><USER24> A standard for embedding the document data inside a PDF would be useful. Make it machine and human readable.

</comment><comment><USER25> a lot of different standards cover it, this is the one the UK's HMRC require submissions in - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL)

</comment><comment><USER12> This sounds interesting for Open Transactions or Ripple.</comment>


Categories from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://staff.science.uva.nl/~poss/categories-from-scratch.html
<comment><USER2> For those interested in a little more rigor, there's a great series of lectures on the subject that was just posted online from Steve Awodey, who wrote one of the best introductory texts on the subject.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF6kHD1DAeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF6kHD1DAeU)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article argues against overly formal approaches, but I actually think it errs too much in that direction. When I'm studying a math thing, at some point I need you to shut up with the English words and simply describe the object in terms of sets, functions, relations and properties. Categories stopped being mysterious for me once I realized they were just multigraphs with a certain algebraic operation defined on edges (composition) such that edges with certain properties (identities) were stipulated to exist.

<comment><USER4> "Categories are just multigraphs with composition and stipulated identities on edges, what's the problem?"

Just kidding, I appreciate the trailhead. :)

<comment><USER5> Ha, I actually read his last sentence as sarcasm initially and thought "haven't I heard this joke..." only to find that you had already referenced the one I was thinking of:

"A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

<comment><USER3> I didn't mean to imply it was trivial to understand, but it's no more difficult than the formal definition of, say, a derivative (which involves a limit, and hence an epsilon-delta construction, which in my experience are not so easy to fit in your head at first). Understanding what a multigraph is should be doable.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree with you, but jargon of all kinds just sounds funny to people unaccustomed to it, regardless of its difficulty to understand!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > More specifically, the common explanatory route to approach categories is > usually: "here is a formal specification of what a category is; then look at > these known things from maths and theoretical computer science, and admire > how they can be described using the notions of category theory." In > practice, quite a few people only adopt conceptual objects by abstracting > from two or more contexts where the concepts are applicable, instead.

(Note the instead.)

I understand the author's point, and perhaps these examples are easier to follow for non-math people.

However, to be fair, this approach is the approach taken by pretty much every single description of Category Theory I've read. One of the first things MacLane does is provide a bunch of relevant and familiar examples (groups, rings, etc).

<comment><USER2> The examples the author chose are kind of hand-wavy, unix pipes in full are obviously not categories. But I recognize how hard is to come up with examples that aren't contrived and that programmers can relate to without knowing much mathematics.

That's the inherent difficulty in discussing category theory solely in terms of programming, it's hard to see the forest for the trees if you don't have a bunch of well-defined categories you can draw examples from and interrelate.

In an undergraduate course one would typically start with examples from algebraic topology which has a lot of great cross-categorical relations, like how the homology group of a topological space is an example of a functor from the category of groups to the category of topological spaces.

<comment><USER6> > That's the inherent difficulty in discussing category theory solely in terms > of programming

Worse, I don't see any point in categorical models if you want to think solely in terms of programming.

> one would typically start with examples from algebraic topology

My initial exposure was along these lines as well, although the idea of a "course" in category theory seems a bit odd (not in the sense of wrong or bad, just not common-place).

Talking about categories in the context of everyday functional programming (even where the connections are correct) always seemed abstruse and a bit silly. If you're not using categorical models, what's the point (other than giving fancy names to things)? And if you don't have some background in algebra or topology and a specific research goal, why build the models?

<comment><USER2> Well I mean, there is a lot of utility in programming with categorical concepts in Haskell. There's plenty of libraries in the Haskell ecosystem that wouldn't even exist if it weren't for drawing upon category theory for guidance. Pipes is probably the best example of this school of thought on library design. [1]

My point was mostly that I don't think there is a path to really understanding the full generality of category theory through functional programming alone, one has to go learn the pure mathematics as well.

[1] [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pipes-4.1.1/docs/Pipes-C...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pipes-4.1.1/docs/Pipes- Core.html#g:2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> +1 for actually providing meaningful contexts! This is right in line with Situated Learning Theory, to think about how your audience is full of Engineers that want relevant examples rather than abstract math.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic. I just read through it and it is a fantastic diversion from the usual descriptions of category theory

I scoffed at the "we'll explain it in computer terms" notes at the beginning, but that caveat really helped.

</comment><comment><USER9> This post is useless. The most important notions of category theory, namely universal mapping properties, natural transformations and adjoints aren't even mentioned.

<comment><USER10> It's useful for intuitively conveying the notion of what a category actually is. I think many people don't even get past this point. So that in and of itself seems useful to me.

<comment><USER11> Exactly; even though I understood it before; it's hard to convey this to people in 'normal' language. I think this page does that well.</comment></comment></comment>


Treatment from Brain Tissue May Have Spread Alzheimer's Protein - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/09/09/438839277/brain-tissue-transplants-may-have-spread-alzheimers-protein <comment><USER2> Very interesting - thank you for sharing.

Summary for others:

Protein misfolding and aggregation inside the cell was known to contribute to Alzheimers. This article points to the possibility of misfolded and aggregated proteins of Alzheimer patients triggering (or seeding) misfolding and aggregation of otherwise 'healthy' proteins in non-alzheimer patients. Much like the mad cow disease.

<comment><USER3> Are CJD and Alzheimer's two names for the same thing, just with different mechanisms of transmission and initial loads?

(I walked away from a protein misfolding seminar with the vague impression that this was the case but I never managed to track down someone who knew enough to answer.)

<comment><USER4> They are different, but related. _Some symptoms of CJD can be similar to symptoms of other progressive neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's or Huntington's disease. However, CJD causes unique changes in brain tissue which can be seen at autopsy. It also tends to cause more rapid deterioration of a person's abilities than Alzheimer's disease or most other types of dementia._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Prions are quite difficult to inactivate. Table 2 in this paper:

[http://www.shea- online.org/Assets/files/other_papers/Prion.p...](http://www.shea- online.org/Assets/files/other_papers/Prion.pdf)

shows data on what seems to work and not. "Standard" autoclave procedures don't.

If the misfolded proteins referred to in the article share the inactivation robustness of prion proteins, it doesn't seem all that remote a possibility that surgical instruments used on Alzheimers patients could spread the illness.

Anybody know if surgical instrument disinfection procedures vary according to the particulars of the patient they were used on?

<comment><USER6> What do you do with neurosurgical tools used in CJD patients? THROW AWAY! (disposed by incineration)

Edit: source= [http://epi.publichealth.nc.gov/cd/docs/CJD_FAQ.pdf](http://epi.publichealth.nc.gov/cd/docs/CJD_FAQ.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Is there any way of sanitizing surfaces or tools exposed to prions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _The study involved autopsies of eight people who had received injections of human growth hormone as children more than 30 years ago. The growth hormone, extracted from human pituitary glands, had been tainted with a protein that caused these people to develop a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease._

A very high % of NFL players currently take HGH or have taken HGH for a significant amount of time. Brain health is a constant topic of conversation for the NFL, I wonder if transmitting brain disease through brain tissue injections is something they need to look at outside of concussions.

<comment><USER9> Not sure, but maybe it's obtained through a different process now? (genetic engineering of bacteria)

<comment><USER10> Yes, according to the article it hasn't been made from human tissue since the late 1980s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have just seen the front page of this morning's Mirror (lowish-quality UK newspaper), and it covers this story with the headline "YOU CAN CATCH ALZHEIMER'S". Appalling.</comment>


Nokia Acquires Dopplr (confirmed)  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dopplr.com/2009/09/28/nokia-acquires-dopplr/ <comment><USER2> News from Helsinki was they paid "substantially lower" than that listed price. I suspect $8-$10M was the actual price based on anecdotes floating around now in Europe.

Not bad for the original angels, since they at least got a few times their money back ($1.25M originally raised). Not a home run if you're a true angel investor and need 20x multiples though.

</comment><comment><USER3> ReadWriteWeb claims a sale price of $15-22m. Can anyone confirm/deny this? ( [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nokia_buys_dopplr_the_o...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nokia_buys_dopplr_the_ovi- based_foursquare.php) )

On a tangent, why does everyone drop the 'e' in '*er' these days? Flickr, dopplr, and -many moons ago- twittr.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.doppler.com/>

<http://www.flicker.com/>

It's tough to get real single words as domains these days.</comment></comment>


Earn a Master of Information and Data Science Online - <AUTHOR> http://requestinfo.datascience.berkeley.edu/index.html?s=linkedinspcpc&l=1020_mids_greenstates_skills-industry_comp-hightech_gen3apply-logo&utm_source=linkedinspcpc&utm_campaign=1020_mids_greenstates_skills-industry_comp-hightech_gen3apply-logo&utm_medium=link <comment><USER2> I have/had my eye on this one. I spoke to the admission counselor for this program. Apparently, they assign each student one counselor if you join this program. Here are some details:

\- 100% online [0] (you do have to visit the campus for a week during the course)

\- Total price tag: $60,000 (Yes, pretty steep)

\- You can finish in 1-2 years depending on how much you can do

\- You must take the GRE or GMAT. No exceptions. I asked them. You also need to apply to this like any regular MS program which means good GPA (3+ min but you must have great work experience etc)

\- Here is the curriculum in case you are interested [1]

Overall, I was very interested in this due to the berkeley brand and 100% online offering. But 60K seems too steep to invest and not to mention that I have to take GRE/GMAT. After being in the industry (real world) for 10+ years, I am just not interested in any of these exams. So I am passing. Will look for cheaper options.

Forgot to mention that they are aggressively selling this. The counselor called me like 15 times (literally) before I responded.

[0] [http://datascience.berkeley.edu](http://datascience.berkeley.edu)

[1] [http://datascience.berkeley.edu/academics/curriculum/](http://datascience.berkeley.edu/academics/curriculum/)

<comment><USER3> Yea, I came to the same conclusions. $60K seems like a lot for any online degree. Obviously there are still people working behind the scenes, but to me a majority of the cost is covering the Berkeley brand. While that is very attractive, I wouldn't pay more than $20,000 for this program. The knowledge itself is very valuable, but attaining it should not be so costly when there are amazing free resources all over the place.

<comment><USER4> I like the Georgia Tech MS Computer Science [0] which was in the 8K range. That seems reasonable for an online education that's mostly self-driven.

I hate the feeling pay to play of a lot of our higher-level education as it seems that what you learn has nothing to really do with where you learn it.

[0] [http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/](http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/)

<comment><USER5> So much of the value of going to a place like Stanford or Caltech or Harvard, etc. is in the people you will interact with. In an online program, that value is probably completely lost. Given that, I just don't see why someone would choose this over a much more cost-effective program. While a "top tier" university does look nice on the resume, I don't believe it is mandatory, anymore. If you're competent and work hard, you can build a reputation in Open Source software that will get you a job at most places, including the really sought after places (I've gotten two recruitment letters from Google, and a handful from other places), regardless of where your degree is from.

Of course, if you're competent and work hard, you can probably build your own job from scratch in any number of software and technology fields.

<comment><USER6> Not to diminish your accomplishments, but you should know that Google casts a very wide net in their recruiting. I've been contacted several times by them for positions that I am not even remotely qualified for.

<comment><USER5> Yes, that's probably true; and I doubt I would actually get a job at Google were I interested in one (I don't have a degree; I started my first company before finishing any school). They were pretty specific about why they were contacting me, and it was well-targeted for the position they were hiring for (and my company co-founder currently works in that role for Google). But, I've never posted anything anywhere ever that would indicate I'm looking for work, so I don't get a lot of recruitment overtures except from people that actually know what I do.

Anyway, that probably wasn't a useful addition to my point. I believe you're more likely to get hired for a good company if somebody within the company knows you, and you're more likely to know people in good companies if you go to one of the "good" schools for your field. That doesn't happen with online degrees, no matter how prestigious the school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was a student of this MIDS program for one semester after attending Hack Reactor in the spring. I took three classes this summer, which is the closest thing they have to full-time. I can say without hesitation that it would be an enormous financial mistake for most people to join the program.

Just a quick overview of some of the problems they have:

\- Poorly considered curriculum. Our data visualization class involved no d3js or training with data viz tools. Students were told to teach themselves the tools in their spare time while studying data viz theory (Edward Tufte, etc.) in class.

\- Cost. There's absolutely no way to justify the $60k price tag, especially with no in-state tuition option.

\- Choice of instructors. They're trying to increase the size of the program too quickly, while throwing in new instructors with zero teaching experience. These instructors also have part-time or full-time jobs outside of MIDS, so I didn't even get my grades back for assignments from the first month by two weeks before finals. It would often take a minimum of 2-4 weeks to get grades back.

I've officially withdrawn from MIDS, and I'm attending Zipfian this fall. I strongly recommend considering any and all alternatives to MIDS before even applying.

</comment><comment><USER8> I know this price is pretty on par with the likes of Northwestern and other great schools that offer similar online programs. But it seems a bit insulting when schools like Georgia Tech are offering a $7k online Masters CS. A lot of the infrastructure of modern college is online anyways, so I'm not sure that putting the lectures online and removing the facilities completely is progressive. Learning to scale these classrooms efficiently and continually reducing the fixed cost per student seems to be what we're (me, without the dedication/job willing to pay for this degree) waiting for. Especially, if the goal really is to provide an education available to all online

</comment><comment><USER9> You don't seem to be getting a Berkeley degree; "datascience@berkeley's technology service provider works with a different university to offer an online data science program that is unaffiliated with the University of California." (3rd page of the form). I wonder what that university would be.

<comment><USER10> Also wonder who the "technology service provider" is. Is it just a repackaging of something like Coursera for $60k?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest thing that hasn't been discussed yet is that the admissions counselors and marketing seems to be entirely run by 2U.

Not saying this is not a good company or that online education is not good - just that 2U is representing themselves as part of Berkeley Admissions.

Check this - [http://2u.com/partners/berkeley/](http://2u.com/partners/berkeley/)

Was contacted by this person when I wanted to learn more about the program, who's email signature looked like this:

 _Peter Wahlberg

Admissions Counselor

datascience@berkeley Admissions Office

UC Berkeley School of Information

firstname.lastname@example.com

datascience.berkeley.edu_

But he also works for 2U - maybe only for 2U - [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/peter- wahlberg/67/800/27b](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-wahlberg/67/800/27b)

Again this admissions counselor and the company are innovating in the education space which is a good thing, but I do find it odd to misrepresent 2U employees as Berkeley admissions counselors - especially when I talked to him on the phone and he defended the $60k price tag by saying an MBA is $80k.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think one is probably better off with earning a masters in statistics. This just seems like another way for Berkeley to sell another expensive degree with little supporting evidence that it will land jobs.

</comment><comment><USER13> The page has an icon that says "Hacker safe" but doesn't even use SSL when transmitting your information.

<comment><USER14> Good catch. It also has "Your privacy is important to us" and a SSL-like padlock. The web-server at requestinfo.datascience.berkeley.edu doesn't even have a valid certificate (it is return Cloudflare's certificate). So if you were thinking of typing in HTTPS manually then think again...

They do send the form to: [https://salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UT...](https://salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8)

But as we all know if the form itself is in HTTP then it can be intercepted and modified to send the info to an attacker's own web-server making the fact that they're sending to a HTTPS-enabled server really rather meaningless.

HTTP form to HTTPS essentially breaks HTTPS's MITM protections, it only keeps the encryption somewhat in-place (although with a successful MITM the encryption is effectively disabled).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Now you can earn a degree in data science from anywhere in the world.

Yet they ask for a US college GPA to even get to the form? Little confused. Is that information used to determine your eligibility and why is there no "no clue" option? A GPA is a very US-centric thing.

<comment><USER15> Maybe they just mean you can earn your credits from anywhere in the world, not that anyone in the world can apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As other people have pointed out that even though its an online degree it has the same price as an offline one. Though it doesn't have the same credential as Berkeley (or maybe the rigorousness), Coursera's Data Science specialization [1] from John Hopkins costs $500. Recently they announced that they have partnered with SwiftKey [2] for the final capstone project.

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1](https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1)

[2] [https://www.class-central.com/report/data-science- specializa...](https://www.class-central.com/report/data-science- specialization-switftkey/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I spoke with Berkeley when deciding where I was going to apply and got the sense that they plan on leaning on their more established programs to provide instruction. While this may sound great, you won't get the specific data science instruction that these curriculums require.

After an awful experience with Northwestern's online analytics program, I don't want to touch any of these programs.

<comment><USER18> As someone who is interested in Northwestern's Predictive Analytics program, I would be interested in hearing your specific issues with that program.

<comment><USER17> I only got through one class, but have heard my concerns echoed by many who are only continuing the program because the have invested so much into it.

The program is based on weekly discussion board posts and a few exams per course. For the most part, I find myself attempting to put fluff into my posts rather than meaningful analysis.

There are "sync sessions" throughout the courses, but they don't occur every week. This is much unlike a MOOC, which provides a set of weekly lectures to view and gain understanding.

There was zero project work in my initial class and projects at or below the level of undergrad projects in more advanced courses.

I managed an A average while spending the absolute minimum amount of time on the class.

When paying 4,000 dollars per course, I had hoped that the instruction would be at the same level or better than that of a set of MOOCs. In the field of data science, I believe the time can easily be directed towards side projects for greater knowledge and similar employment prospects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know. If you want to pay-to-play, it's not a terrible deal, especially considering that it can be just one year and you don't need to leave your job to do it. Opportunity cost is the largest outlay when it comes to masters and doctoral degrees, and this format essentially eliminates that. But yes, networking beyond your cohort would be difficult. It would be really nice if they had a good placement program, but I can't speak to that.

The real kicker here though is that these classes aren't open to other Berkeley students. There are general equivalents in the Stats department, in CS, and in the iSchool, but not tailored to generalists looking to add some kind of "Data Science" specialization. The curriculum is really walled off from the rest of the students, which is annoying because I want to take some of these classes.

Anyway, I think the real question here is how much opportunity cost you can avoid in the online format and the placement/salary you should expect coming out of it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Or ... you could stay in the city and get an MS in Analytics from University of San Francisco at the downtown 101 Howard campus. [http://www.usfca.edu/analytics/](http://www.usfca.edu/analytics/) The program is excellent, has a REAL practicum experience and boasts nearly 100% employment 3 months post graduation. It comes in at about half the cost of cal's program. [Full disclosure ... I'm an adjunct there] Here's what you can learn in one year [http://www.usfca.edu/artsci/msan/courses/](http://www.usfca.edu/artsci/msan/courses/) The combination of location, instruction and work experience is unprecedented.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm taking the GTOMSCS from Georgia Tech, for less than $7,000. I asked Berkeley if they have any plans to change their steep price tag ($50-60K), and they said no, because I'll be allowed to go on campus and get all benefits of an on campus student. I told them I don't plan to do so, and that I think I'm paying a high premium for a "feature" that I don't use.

They didn't reply.

in G.Tech you CAN'T go on campus, although the degree is the same. I didn't hear of a decrease in the on campus program enrollment there.

I think that if GT will show profit and that it didn't hurt their on campus program (and that the program rigor is not affected) then other universities will have to follow.

<comment><USER22> I just got accepted to the GT OMSCS as well for the January group. When do you start or have you already started? What's your focus? I'm focusing on parallel computing and machine learning.

<comment><USER21> Welcome aboard! I started in the first cohort (last Spring semester). I'm not sure yet what focus to take, probably software engineering & databases and machine learning, (we have enough credits to take both, but I guess we'll have to chose one officially...)

I'm taking software dev process this semester, a bit of relaxation after advanced OS (good course, but not easy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find this to be an excellent offering and justified overall.. some may not agree but:

You don't have to "go anywhere" to complete it. The course load IS comprehensive. The tuition cost might be steep but in the end as the commenter said, it is cheaper and vastly superior to a MBA.

From what I gained, the partner also works with the likes of Duke and American U to bring the program online.. among others. Who cares & thank you partner. ([http://2u.com/partners/](http://2u.com/partners/))

This is the future and happens to be the future done right.

</comment><comment><USER24> Its difficult to deny the need, relevance and popularity of the topic of this degree. I just think that there may be a startup idea here: just offer an opportunity to learn the curriculum as a vocational training/course over 4-6 months, along with a practical project at the end of it (say a Kaggle problem). I can imagine a tie up with companies to solve problems, very much like Kaggle and tie ups with companies looking for analytics talent.

<comment><USER25> There are already a large number of bootcamps being formed for data science. For example Zipfian Academy (former Berkeley students), Insight Data Science, Metis (owned by Kaplan), Leada (a startup of former Berkeley students which has our company as a partner), and probably others I'm not aware of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As others have said, $60k sounds steep for this. I wonder if these data science programs will catch on. Having done my bachelors in 'nanoscience' \- I feel that these data science courses are a little buzzwordy in a similar fashion. I'm somewhat skeptical that these data science programs will exceed the value of a graduate degree in stats, math, cs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are their any legitimate programs like these for Bachelor's degrees? I've had my eye on doing something like this, but as I never completed my undergrad before getting sucked into the tech goldmine, I'm ineligible. Online undergrad degrees seem to mostly be diploma mills with no real value.

<comment><USER6> In the US, probably the most legitimate option is Western Governors University [http://www.wgu.edu/](http://www.wgu.edu/). They're an accredited, non-profit institution. Obviously, it's not the most prestigious degree out there, but it's not looked down on as being a for-profit scam like University of Phoenix or similar.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for that info. Is this the only college that has an online bachelors program or just the only one you are aware of?

<comment><USER6> Many many colleges have online bachelors programs. This is just one that I know has a decent reputation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here is another option from a different UC university if you are in the San Diego area: [http://maseng.ucsd.edu/dse/](http://maseng.ucsd.edu/dse/)

<comment><USER30> Hey thanks for posting this. It looks like a great opportunity for me! Are you enrolled in this by any chance?

<comment><USER29> I actually just got enrolled into the program. It begins at the beginning of October and this will be their first cohort for the program as it is brand new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Based on this conversation, what are some of the Big Data/Data Science programs with hands on experience that you guys think are worth the price tag?

<comment><USER7> Zipfian Academy ([http://www.zipfianacademy.com/](http://www.zipfianacademy.com/)) definitely has hands-on experience and is worth the $16k tuition. That's where I'm going now that I've left the Berkeley MIDS program, where I learned almost nothing.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the mention, Sonali! One of the founders of Zipfian Academy here, happy to answer any questions you might have about the program.

<comment><USER31> Would love to have something comparable in NY area! Too bad I cannot be in Cali for 6 weeks :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Note on the last page of registration that the degree is offered by another online university and not affiliation with UCB.

</comment><comment><USER34> I used to (and still might) get spam from this university, so they seem a bit sketchy...

</comment><comment><USER35> I wish they posted their curriculum somewhere.

<comment><USER17> Here you go! [http://datascience.berkeley.edu/academics/curriculum/](http://datascience.berkeley.edu/academics/curriculum/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, how disappointing with the $60k price tag. Berkeley should be ashamed.</comment>


Announcing the Facebook 2011 Hacker Cup - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=467531498919 <comment><USER2> Even the Facebook comments on a geeky announcement like this make me question humanity.

"Lol... what?" "May as well call this site HACKBOOK! IT'S ALL GARBAGE NOW!" "This is freaking scary coz pipol will be able to hack into any fb ccount they want to. This is crack..."

Let's not forget that we all live inside a cozy little bubble where some level of intelligence and familiarity with technology can be assumed.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but I'm glad Facebook (and especially Zuckerberg) is doing their part to change mainstream perception of the word "hack". For example in the 60 Minutes interview:

 _"I see 'hack' everywhere: 'Hack,'" Stahl pointed out. "It has a negative connotation, doesn't it?"

"When we say hacker, there's this whole definition that engineers have for themselves, where it's very much a compliment when you call someone a hacker, where to hack something means to build something very quickly, right? In one night, you can sit down and you could churn out a lot of code, and at the end, you have a product," Zuckerberg explained._

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_wucE5Giko&t=2m20s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_wucE5Giko&t=2m20s)

<comment><USER4> ... and bugs... lots of bugs... of course bugs in your Facebook albums are exceptions.

I wish I could write code without consequences during maintenance stage :(

<comment><USER4> Not quite sure why this is being downvoted but let me put my more "politically correct" hat on.

I don't feel strongly with the presence of the word hack in the same line with engineering. They just don't gel.

I rarely and hardly seen any engineers pulling one-nighter writing code with lack of automation tests. I see a lot of young hackers do that.

I would strongly suggest the downvoters go to InfoQ.com and search for Aditya's presentation regarding Facebook engineering to understand the issues arise for having a "hacker" culture.

And I'm telling you the fact that Facebook albums have had UI bugs; they frequently re-appear after what I felt is a re-deploy of their updates/newer versions of the website

Back button doesn't necessarily work sometime

One can see other people pictures but can't see their album (can't click the "photo" link but can click the photo in their profile page)

On iPhone, often one can't see "more..." pictures.

When I say those bugs in Facebook albums are exceptions, I truly mean it. Facebook can have buggy code yet they probably won't get penalized by their user. None of their user fled for other social networking sites.

<comment><USER3> I agree "hacking" and "engineering" aren't the same thing, but they're good complementary skills to have as a developer.

Hackathons are great for prototyping ideas/products/proof of concepts. Engineering is essential for building large/stable/scalable systems. Clearly Facebook is good at both.

I like to think of myself as both a hacker and an engineer. Neither word describes what I do completely.

<comment><USER4> Whether FB wants to call it hackathons, hack-a-tack, tick-hack-toe doesn't matter.

But the message from the parent here is that it's cool to build a product by pulling one-nighter. (And we all know that's the culture in Facebook).

The same theme again and again that sort of... screw our industry as a whole: romanticizing the notion of hacker.

On the other hand, I don't think FB Chat was written in one-night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very smart (and relatively cheap) way to find good engineers!

<comment><USER3> Pseudo-related random anecdote: In college (circa 2005) I came across some programming puzzles Facebook had posted for people interested in jobs. I thought Facebook might be an interesting place to work, so I came up with solutions to a couple of them, but never sent them in because I wasn't graduating for a year or two.

I mentioned this to a few friends who laughed at the idea of working at _Facebook_. Not so funny now, eh?

<comment> brown9-2 Makes you wonder about what prospective employers people are laughing about today.

<comment><USER6> I remember in 2007 I was at the Zynga party in Portreo Hill. thrown with some other startups. I think at the time it was only 17 people, and they were looking for engineers.

My friends and I were like, nah, another silly gaming company. Now their cap is almost equal to EA.

The beauty of the valley that every 5 years the landscape changes and roles reverse.

Be nice to other people, your fellow engineers, your employees if you are a manager, as they might be your boss in few years.

Something that I am learning myself, live and learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like fun. Some of the people commenting on that page don't appear to understand the intended meaning of the term hacker in that context. But then, they probably aren't the target audience of the competition either. :)

<comment><USER8> But..but, they "liked" Facebook Engineers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'll be honest. My incentive to make it to the final rounds isn't to get a job at Facebook nor money, but to make a bunch of dumb and tired Social Network jokes on the Facebook campus.

 _"Yes a compile error! Now to take a shot. WTF? Where's my shot? I was promised liquor!"_

 _"Hey don't distract me, I'm connected to the grid."_ "Sir the competition is over, please leave the facility." _"I said I'm hooked in!"_

 _"3rd place‽ It's because you never got into Finals Zack, isn't it?"_

</comment><comment><USER9> Google is organizing similar event aka Google Code Jam ( <http://code.google.com/codejam> ) for years. Facebook Hacker Cup feels like a clone of it.

Similarities:

1\. Annual algorithmic competitions.

2\. Various online elimination rounds.

3\. World finals at headquarters.

4\. Prizes: 1st place = $5000 USD, 2nd place = 2000$ USD, 3rd place for $1000 USD and $100 for 4th through 25th place.

<comment><USER10> GCJ is itself similar to the much older ACM's ICPC ( <http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc> , around in some form since 1977 [http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=The%20Early%20Ye...](http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=The%20Early%20Years) ), though of course it's not limited to college students.

<comment><USER11> The ICPC is fairly different in format though. For one, it's always team- based, and usually has much harder problems since the entrants are always university-level students who have taken advanced algorithms courses. I've participated in both TopCoder contests and the ICPC and the GCJ/HackerCup are definitely TopCoder-style rather than ICPC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> cheaper than the recruiter fees, i'm sure

</comment><comment><USER13> smart recruiting tool</comment>