skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alternately, you could conclude that instead of "mediocre" Asians being excluded by bias, Asians have an external advantage that makes them perform better. Maybe it's cultural, since most Asians are taught a very strong work ethic and heavy emphasis is placed on formal schooling, succeeding, and fitting in. Maybe Asians are physically better adapted to that type of work, with brains that retain information more easily or buttocks that don't get sore from sitting in a chair all day.

The "high performance means there's a bias" theory only works if you assume that everyone is starting from the same social, cultural, and physical baseline. They aren't.

Maybe a better metric would be if there were no mediocre data points among a certain group; that would be more evidence (but still not necessarily good evidence) that you have to exceptional to get attention and overcome the "bias barrier", not simply that most of a certain type of performer does better than a different type.
> Google doesn't censor information that hurts Google's interests.

I challenge you to find a Chrome extension in the Chrome web store that lets you download Youtube videos. Does Google allow, say, Amazon app store app in the Play store?

Apple doesn't have a search engine of it's own so I cannot point you to search results showing how to use other software instead of Apple's but do you really think they would censor the results of a search engine? The comparison is irrelevant.

What about that time when Google banned Disconnect from the Play store? [1] Meanwhile Apple actually built a way to create content filters into the OS and actively promotes them in the App Store.

I'm not saying that Apple is without fault, certainly not, but neither of the big companies are a shining beacon of enlightenment, and every one of them operates out of self-interest.

[1] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2411562/google-slap...
Today several chemotherapy drugs are made using yew tree extracts (taxanes). Paclitaxel and Docetaxel are both made from extracts of the yew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docetaxel#Nature
An ad hominem call is often a logical fallacy, as in many cases the person can be a very key point in the argument.

If some one is running for president for example then his personal views and life experience can and should be brought into question regardless of what his says in his speeches.

This case isn't different, he isn't talking about global warming he is talking about founding and funding a new company so his past, and current troubles are very much material to the debate and cannot and should not be thrown aside because it might appear to to be an ad hominem.
You really don't seem to have a good grasp on free market economics.
Bootstrapping is a useful test of the completeness of a compiler, and it makes development easier.

The Go compiler is fast because it does very little. It doesn't do much optimisation and Go is not a very sophisticated language and so does not require much of it's compiler. It is not comparable to the Scala or Dotty compilers.
> I tend to believe that centralization of power will lead to corruption simply by making it more possible/likely.

Completely agree.

> Do you think that something like Ethereum (https://www.ethereum.org) would enable us to sidestep these kinds of problems, at least on the web?

Honestly not sure. Part of the problem with the way things work today is that everyone is chasing money -- the next hot app, the next unicorn. That's how FB, Apple and Android attracted people into their walled gardens.

As long as we have hungry developers, we are going to have the problem with gardens attracting them.
Which wouldn't be so much of an issue (yes, yes) if lots of commits weren't of the type "Fixes #3243".
Wearing a seatbelt and sitting (mostly) upright is not orthogonal to sleeping - people sleep in barely reclining airline seats all the time, on long car trips my wife and I take turns dozing in the passenger seat, with seatbelt secure and seat back only slightly reclined.

Self driving cars don't have to park where there are haphazard parking rules, they can drive to a garage or lot that caters to self-driving cars.
Isn't that what people claim is happening when you make people pay for more expensive renewable energy?
> I challenge you to find a Chrome extension in the Chrome web store that lets you download Youtube videos.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/youtube%20download...
Why can't you fall asleep with a seatbelt and upright seat? I've done it as a passenger many times
its self reported, most likely placebo effect
Plus, the world's poor stand to benefit so much from climate change!
Self-hosted OpenVPN server on a cheap VPS in whichever country I want/need it. Simple to setup, full control, and the cost of the VPS is lower than most paid services (and can be used for hosting other stuff too if I want).
Seriously good script.
Perhaps companies that choose not to do this can market their products with an "100%-arbitration-clause-free!! " slogan somewhere. Then we could hope this catches on.

Corporations are assuming that we don't pay attention to this. It's OK to give an app or a business a 1-star review on the reason that the arbitration clause makes you uncomfortable.
The Best Technology for Fighting Climate Change? Trees
Rise and Fall of Nuclear Power
It a sensitive area and there are many compounding causes that can give similar effects - different races could have different rates of criminal activity for example - so you need good data that goes beyond anecdotes and can look widely across the system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say you probably need to assess the system in question against other systems - perhaps places where biases of different kinds are expected a priori.

Presumably public defender are in court pretty much every day? So even assuming a caseload of one a day for 300 days of those 12 years we have a ratio of 1:1800 of "whites" to others. Is this really anything like how it is? Wikipedia figures (link below) suggest about 6-7 times the incarceration rate per head of population for "adult black non-Hispanic males" and ~3 times the level of "whites" for Hispanic males.

Interestingly the example case in footnote 4 is a report of a Vietnamese male being killed and the killer being aided by the prosecution in preparing a case for self-defence. Despite this being referenced as a case of racism - which I can't determine the truth of but seems quite possible - Wikipedia tells me that "Asians" have the lowest incarceration rate of all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...) which following through with the logic of "non-whites are biased against, this can be seen by proportionally less whites being convicted" means that Asians are getting the most bias in their favour of all. But of course there are other explanations, like Asians committing less crimes, or Asians being less often caught committing crimes.

You appear to have looked at this in depth, I have not, do you know of comparative studies: It strikes me that in a situation where a "black" police officer arrests someone, they have a black public defending attorney, or a black judge then if there is racism based on the controlling forces being light-skinned ("white") that those cases would have a significant difference in profile of arrest, prosecution and incarceration respectively. This must be pretty easy to demonstrate with the available statistics - I think that would convince me () that there wasn't a misinterpretation of results; that for example it wasn't primarily the influence of poverty.

What I found quite interesting in your citation was it seemed not to be concerned at all - eg when looking at traffic stops - with whether those arrested had committed a crime or not, similarly when looking at drug use and dealing.

- I don't understand racism at all which makes it difficult to imagine that it's possible to be having the massive effects claimed.
Show HN: Trenzz – An app to show you events around you based on their popularity
But would you rather walk 3 blocks in the rain (or snow) to a bus, wait at the stop for it to come, then walk another 3 blocks to your office, or would you rather have the minibus pick you up at your door and drop you at your office? Point-to-point travel is where self-driving cars excel - even if you're sharing the vehicle with others so you don't have a direct trip.
Oh I interperted the use of "thankful" here as in relation to the cause, not in relation to being thankful.
It's all part and parcel. Psychiatry and psychology are used continually; the physical stuff is intermittent.
This approach relies on the unspoken "positivity" assumption that the pool of applicants is large enough that there exist individuals in the biased-against category that were not selected, and moreover that these denied applicants are "exchangeable" with the successful ones.

For example, assume that we find that founders who won a MacArthur "genius" grant outperformed the others. Further assume that there are only a limited number of such founders, and that all available were selected. Certainly one wouldn't want to conclude in this case that there is a bias against MacArthur fellows.

That seems obvious, but it gets trickier once you have lots of factors involved. What if the group you find to outperform consists of female founders with a PhD, substantial industry experience, and red hair[1]. Can you conclude that the process is biased against females? Males with PhD's? Anyone with red hair? Generally no, unless you are willing to assume that all of your factors are causal.

Worse, you can't even assume that it's biased against people with all of the measured factors unless you also assume that all unmeasured factors are randomly distributed. If it turns out that "a positive mental attitude" is an unmeasured but defining characteristic of success, if the interviewers rejected applicants who had less of this but you failed to include this in your category, you would be wrong to conclude that there is an unfair bias.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7194/full/453562a...
That's not better is it? It just means that if you're already famous, you can get around rules that apply to others. It centralizes and increases censorship.
>we can't just dress up. It's about the extremities, not the rest of the body

you just don't dress up enough. Once the rest of your body is hot enough, the blood vessels in extremities will open wider to ventilate that extra heat off.
This fails basic economic checks:

First, most billionaires don't just have billions in cash laying around usable to buy things. To get that, they'd have to sell off their companies, which usually lowers the value, so the cash to purchase needs to come from others willing to put billions of cash into purchasing these companies. The economic loss from this step would be huge.

Next, how much of the coal supply can they affect?

The US mines about a billion tons a year of coal, and has done so for many years, with value about 50/ton, making this around 50 billion a year in produced value. Presumably the places we mine coal has much left (many places put our coal supply at about 400 years worth).

This puts the value of the US coal around 20 trillion (ignoring a few factors like present value, etc., but this is around the total value). To purchase the land right from owners would cost somewhere around this amount, give or take an order of magnitude.

So the sheer number of billionaires needing to liquidate their companies, sucking the capital out of circulation, just to purchase land they will never extract any value from, makes this approach a non-starter. It just would not make much dent, if any, since closing a few mines will not reduce demand; others would likely step up production.

This money would likely be much better used to invest in new energy research to wean us off coal in the long run.
On a simple mathematical basis, this is false.

Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation in group B.

Now suppose that we select without bias or inaccuracy all the applicants that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. That means we select a subset of A with a range of 80% to 100% and a subset of B with a range from 80% to 90%. The average graduation rate of scholarship winners from group A will be 90% and that from group B will be 85%.

But we haven't been biased against A. We've selected according to the exact same perfect evaluation process and criterion from both groups. It was just their prior distribution that was different.

The actual applicant groups for jobs or financing in the real world, when they are divided by demographic factors like age, sex, race, and educational level, will almost always manifest different variances in success levels even when the averages are the same. That makes this test useless and mathematically illiterate.

And when we use a normal distribution, as we should always expect given the central limit theorem, the mathematical problems get even more intense.

This short comment is not up to pg's usual high standards for his essays.
What a bizarre line of thinking. A 50/50 split in reasoning isn't "diversity", it's "uncertainty". It is the absence of knowledge. If a researchers "ideology" related to their field wasn't moving in line with results, we would rightly call them biased.
How do they enforce their beliefs via the political process? Last time I checked (in the U.S. at least) you needed to be elected to office in order to pass policy and I don't believe there are that many billionaires in elected office.

If you are suggesting they manipulate it with donations then remember that your money spends just as well in Washington as theirs does. And don't forget that global-warming-denier billionaires make campaign contributions as well.
> Does he honestly believe that First Round is biased against founders from elite colleges?

Maybe FR is. Imagine that elite college is highly predictive of success, so you prefer to pick elite college grads, all other available evidence being equal. You're biased toward elite college grads, right?

But what if elite college grads really are phenomenally more successful, and you can't see the detailed reason (high school experience, network, whatever), to the point that they are all better than all non-elite college grads. Then even selecting 90% of your pool from elites, and 10% from the rest, is biased against the actual merit of the applicants.

[these numbers are totally made up. I'm not saying elite college grads really have these characteristics.]

The trickiness is that you can't see everything when you evaluate, so you have to assign weights to the factors you have, and leverage corellations to hidden important factor.
Fittingly, another type of bias observed in the linked report is that against Solo Founders. The report states that solo founders do worse when measured against the same yardstick as multiple founders. Maybe from a VC perspective this is intended (big raise => bigger exit?), but I'd argue that you don't need to raise as much when you have a solo founder because dilution is less of a concern.
>admissions officers limit the number of Asian students accepted instead of saying admissions folks are biased against Asian students //

The effect is the same isn't it? Less chance for a student with ancestors from a particular geographic locale getting a placement.
So true.

PG's articles are generally filled with good intuitive insight. Unfortunately, statistics can be very tricky to turn into folksy wisdom. Rules of thumb like "you need 30 samples before you can say anything" that are derived from the CLT are a good example of ones that work well enough in practice, even if they obscure some underlying subtleties. This article is an example of a rule that sounds simple, but actually has so many asterisks that one would expect it to be mostly useless in practice.

If women are performing better on average, it doesn't mean that you should invest in more women necessarily. What if all the remaining candidates would have a negative mean return? If they included Uber and all of a sudden the women now underperform men, does that mean they're biased against men and they need to invest in less women?

There's just so many statistical fallacies at play here that it's a shame that Jessica, Sam, or Geoff didn't point out that maybe someone with a stats background should read the article first before publishing it.
I noticed some choose-your-own-adventure games on Steam (Zombie Exodus, Tin Star) built with ChoiceScript[0], a markup that seems to build into a full interactive game deliverable complete with state tracking and html forms for user input/prompt.

[0]: https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescri...
I'm surprised the article didn't mention Mercedes' history with drive assist systems especially. This is very old tech for them. For instance, I recall seeing a Mercedes S class with dynamic cruise control in 2002.
Even if Asians perform better for external reasons, the selection process should account for that before the selection is made, and the admitted class should be roughly equal performers, as a group. Unless Asians have a very lumpy shaped performance curve across the group
PHP 7 Compatibility for HHVM with Symfony Polyfill
If the price of coal rises 50%, a whole host of non-coal alternatives suddenly become economically feasible.

So yes, entrenched actors (i.e. coal companies) will react to a rise in the price of coal by mining for more coal. However, many other actors will be incentivized to innovate and develop new sources of energy.
Interesting thoughts. However, this argument is biased because it assumes that the performance of the applicants WHO WERE ACCEPTED is not biased by the selection process itself, and that the performance characteristics of the selected sample are representative of the performance characteristics of the total, which could be a weak assumption.

An attempt at translating to mathematics (feel free to correct me!):

X = event that person belongs to group x

Y = event that person belongs to group y

S = event that person is selected

W = event that person will perform like a 'winner'

for simplicity P(X) + P(Y) = 1

Naturally, 'unbiased' in this case is simply
P(S|X) = P(S1), and P(S|Y) = P(S2), i.e. that the selection process is independent of a certain variable X or Y

PG says we can measure the the performance of these selected applicant winners for each class, i.e. P(X|S,W).

I believe PG assumes that:

P(X|W) / P(Y|W) should equal P(X|S,W)/P(Y|S,W). We can see that these are different distributions, since the second is already conditioned on the selection process.

Simplified, PG assumes that P(X|S,W) = P(X|W) i.e. that conditioning on the selection process does not bias the winning results.

Its left for the reader exercise to determine the 'pathological' cases where this selection variable's distribution makes PG's assumption correct or incorrect.

However, this is simply theoretical - the actual distribution may or may not be 'pathological' and the assumptions made by PG could very well be good.
That doesn't actually have a large effect. An example in numpy:

In [14]: x = norm(0.0,1).rvs(100000)
In [15]: mean(x[where(x > 2.0)])
Out[15]: 2.3774795090391301
In [16]: y = norm(0.5,1).rvs(100000)
In [17]: mean(y[where(y > 2.0)])
Out[17]: 2.4372124830289557

I.e., a difference in the mean of 0.5 sigma corresponds to 0.06 in Graham's test statistic.

Graham is a little bit off - a better place to look for bias is the bottom of the accepted distribution than at the mean.
Yeah for me it was not worth it at all. I was prescribed in High School through College but I stopped taking them in College because I turned into a irritable zombie. No amount of productivity boost is worth the emotional and physical damage that stuff does to you.

Also Exercise and Diet helped far more in the long run.
That many phone manufactures don't update their software is not an Android problem. Would Lenovo update their devices more often when their operating system was not based on Android? Would Apple update less often when iOS was based on Android?

Lenovo, Samsung, Apple and Google are all in complete control of the devices they sell: they all control hardware, software and services themselves.

If the software is based on Android or not has nothing to do with how often these devices get updates.
You just linked to a search result page where there is only one extension with 57 reviews that purports to be able to do that. It's liable to get pulled if it gets any more popular.

Every other app is just a generic video downloader and many explicitly mention that they cannot download youtube videos due to Chrome store restrictions.
MacBooks aren't really high quality. Shitty keyboard, pointing device, and an overheating chassis make them subpar (screens are amazing though).

A ThinkPad X250 or T450s with a LiteOn keyboard is pretty good. (Lenovo has two providers for keyboards, one sucks. If you get such a part, just get it replaced under warranty.) The screens don't compete with Apple, but otherwise there's no better laptops available. And if Lenovo doesn't cock up their upcoming "Retro" release, we might see an IBM-esque quality ThinkPad soon.
How to Charge More and Not Be Afraid of Losing Work to Your Client Employees
Renewable energy is paid for by rich people, so long as you don't force economic adoption to occur too fast (eg shifting from coal to solar/wind). There's a reasonable economic adoption curve, if you stay on it, then the rich primarily subsidize the shift - if you move too fast, and to the extent you do so, you punish the poor too much.

The rich pay for the shift through their higher taxes (government R&D, subsidies, etc), funding research at top tier universities, owning large corporations that do R&D or implementation (eg Musk / SolarCity, or Walton / FirstSolar and so on), buying big batteries for their homes, being first to adopt large scale home solar, building massive solar plants or wind farms (or being customers ala Buffett / Berkshire / Mid-American). This is similar to the way the rich subsidize most new technology until it becomes economical.
> It seems that each big centralized walled garden has their targets.

This is false equivalence. Just because you can find an example where Google banned an app does not mean that all platforms are equally unethical.

Google Play simply doesn't allow apps that interfere with other apps. That's the reason the disconnect.me app was removed.

It's telling that other apps from Disconnect are still available on Google Play. Disconnect Search[1], for example, is contrary to Google's interests, but Google does not ban it because it doesn't interfere with other apps.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.disconnect....
Much of the bad stuff in law comes from the reasonableness standard, which is inherently subjective. Each of these are apprised by specific sets of facts unique to each case.

This means no QC is possible.
C++'s SFINAE concept: compile-time introspection of a class
See https://www.twitchinstalls.com/ for an explanation.
Paywall. =(
Or, more charitably, the reviewer thinks knowledge is power! ("or enable others to do so")
CCCdeVideos is
a) the German Channel.
b) not an official Channel.

The CCC recommends using their official Channel https://www.youtube.com/user/mediacccde
The argument against this is that the rough number of bits of information that 15 people can process is way below the number of bits of information processing potential of all consumers and producers.
Downvoted? I thought atheism was A Good Thing with the HN hive mind.
A better way to profile multithreaded programs
You can think of crime lab employees as content creators.