skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's an actual chat transcript of me trying to cancel my membership. Yes I sound like a dick robot, but I become a dick robot when I'm forced to contact the company--instead of just clicking a button--to cancel my membership:

info: Hi, we are currently helping other customers in line ahead of you. We'll be with you as soon as possible.

While you wait, you can try our community forums where experts are online 24/7.

info: You are now chatting with 'Mahesh'

Mahesh: Hello! Welcome to Adobe Customer Service.

Mahesh: Hi there.

jalanco: Cancel my membership.

jalanco: Are you there? Cancel my membership.
info: Your chat transcript will be sent to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at the end of your chat.

Mahesh: I will check and help you.

Mahesh: I see that you have the Creative Cloud plan (one-year) annual commitment subscription with the monthly payment option under your account.

Mahesh: I am really sorry to see you go.

Mahesh: May I ask why you are choosing not to maintain your membership?

jalanco: Please cancel my membership. I don't have a lot of time.

Mahesh: An annual subscription requires a commitment for the full year and monthly payments.

Mahesh: If you decide to end a one-year membership before the 12-month period is over, you are charged 50% of the remaining amount left on your commitment.

Mahesh: In this case, if you are willing to cancel your annual subscription now, you will be charged an early termination fee of USD 250.00.

Mahesh: Is that fine with you?

jalanco: No it is not fine with me. Cancel my membership.

Mahesh: I see that you've purchased a subscription with an annual commitment with a monthly payment. Since you wish to cancel the subscription before the end of one year period, you will be billed 50% of your monthly rate for the remaining months in your annual commitment.

jalanco: Cancel my membership.

Mahesh: Okay, do you wish me to cancel the subscirption with the early termination fee of USD 250.00?

jalanco: No. Cancel my membership. I didn't agree to that.

Mahesh: http://www.adobe.com/misc/subscription_terms.html

Mahesh: Please view the above link to see the terms of the annual commitment subscription that you have under your account.

Mahesh: I understand that you would like to cancel your membership, and I will take care of that for you. However, would you be willing to maintain your membership through your annual commitment & avoid the early termination fee if I offer you the next month of your membership for free?

jalanco: No. Cancel my membership immediately.

Mahesh: I can understand your concern, please allow me a moment while I check for any exception for you.

Mahesh: I am happy that I was able to make an exception for you. I have successfully canceled your Creative Cloud membership (one-year) annual commitment subscription without any early termination fee of USD 250.00 as an one time exception only for you as goodwill gesture.

Mahesh: However this exception will not be done again for you.

Mahesh: Is there anything else I can help you with?

jalanco: Thank you. Nothing else.

Mahesh: Thank you for contacting Adobe. We are available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Goodbye!
As an aside, do they measure violent crime in the same way? I understand that over half of UK recorded violent crime results in no physical injury to the victim, and there are some recorded violent crimes in which the victim is not required to be present.

There is a common false comparison of violent crime between the US and the UK that appears to indicate the UK suffers more violent crime, because what counts as "violent crime" in the UK is much wider than in the US.
Another interesting possibility would be allowing the user to enter two books, and then showing what the engine thinks the routes from one to the other are.
Would love to read more, got a non-paywalled link?
You have a few good points, none of which deny the argument's conclusion.

Biological systems do have a primary goal, that of maintaining their own organization and reproducing. From this derives common cost function for a video game, i.e. stay alive. Another, finding new information in the environment, also derives from the staying alive goal.

Degrees of freedom is a interesting example: from the movement sciences we know that while humans have in principle many degrees of freedom, when performing a task, the nervous system plays two roles: 1) highly constrain teh degrees of freedom and 2) act within the unconstrained subspace. The latter is what all the various ungeneralizable AIs are doing. The former, contraction of degrees of freedom, is the part which is difficult and constitutes a general AI, but it's essentially a learning problem, where the subspace of important degrees of freedom must be learned through interaction.
I think that it is not the market but the erosion of purchasing power that push further the need for lower and lower prices.

But if you look at the electronic device we're talking about here, namely iphones, it is an overpriced piece of hardware used as a display of social status which is unrelated to a market call for cheap electronics.

Apple has more than enough margin and power to be able to secure conflict-free minerals for their devices and lead by example, but they don't because there's no regulations asking for it and they'd rather get a tad more profits for a bunch of shareholders instead of caring for other humans (who happen to be in distant countries and black or brown or yellow and poor).

The more unrest there is in those mineral rich countries, the cheaper the minerals will be and the juicier the profit for shareholders.
I get 1-3 emails per month with "I came across your profile on GitHub and you seem like a match" and then they are talking about position using technologies which I've never used nor which I don't have on my GitHub profile.
President of Finland writes code with 4-9 year old children
That was just an example of useful work. I am sure we could find something both useful and that is not time consuming.
Riemann – A network monitoring system
Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale.

Then we're not really talking about AGI anymore, but a Skyrim-playing engine. Do you see the difference? A human being didn't evolve to play Skyrim, so building your AI with specific knowledge of Skyrim is cheating.

A proper AI should be able to learn to play Skyrim just as well as it could learn to play Chess or Super Mario Bros or any other video game we throw at it, including games not invented until after the AI is written. This is much, much harder than building something that can just play Skyrim.
I'm a southern Louisiana (US "Deep South") native. Here, and in other areas of the south (and elsewhere in the world), we have similarly large "cicadas", which are basically giant crickets. They hatch once every 13 years (shorter than most other cicadas, which hatch every 17 years) [1]. Though the hatches produce huge numbers (sometimes causing areas of road to be literally covered and obscured), and can sometimes be a nuisance because of their sound, they play a very integral role in the ecological cycle and contribute to a very diverse system of plants and animals which many people around here take great pride in. I hope that the residents of Lord Howe Island can learn to live with some new friends.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada
<rant>Meta: This is not directly related to Adobe, but SaaS in general.

I do not want to pay a subscription for each piece of freaking software that I own. I do not want my cellular company claiming it owns my phone.

I understand that folks gotta make a living, and I feel for and support the little guys running niche SaaS businesses. But frack, not everybody can get on this bandwagon.

Adobe is a great example. You pay out the ass to buy their software -- which is great, by the way -- then use it a half-dozen times a year. Should you pay 50 bucks a month? If not, you got nothing. This seems like a terribly bad trade. (Yes I know there are alternatives)

Accounting software: last I checked, the ability to add and subtract was rather trivial for computers. Yet somehow businesses think I should pay a monthly fee for them to continue and add and subtract things from a ledger? Ring tones, simple note-taking, "renting" music to play...

The list is getting rather large. Looking at my monthly spend, I'm paying a lot of money each month for stuff -- whether I use it or not -- that I used to just buy and use when I felt like it. The old model worked in my best interests. The new model does not.

Something's gotta give. I can't imagine the online marketplace supporting everything like this. I also am getting extremely concerned for the poor people that we're effectively locking out of a huge class of software simply because they can't make their monthly vig.</rant>
To the needs of people. As determined by the government (which, in democracies, is supposed to follow the will of people). Determining and acting on the will of people is sort of the only job of the government.

Why does that needs to happen? Because otherwise you get Congo. Europe used to be like that, and our forefathers fought their way out of it with their own blood.

Ask yourself - why is it that you buy food and beverages in your local supermarket or restaurant, and you're not worrying it will poison you? Why is that you can safely buy an electrical appliance and connect it to your wall socket without burning the house down? It's not because free market. It's because those segments of the market have been heavily regulated, and those regulations came to counter various shenanigans companies were pulling off.

Markets do not start regulated, they get regulated - and they get regulated because they're too good at their only job - optimizing for profitability. Regulation is there to stop otherwise profitable abuses from happening.
AWRStudyr is a Chrome extension that shows insights on page performance and SEO
To clarify what I meant by those outlandish figures that have no real ground in reality (I made them ridiculously big to make that obvious):

If phone manufacturers were to insure that the materials have no "human or environmental cost" attached to them, the price would have to increase significantly (unless I'm missing some key aspects of the manufacturing process). I am not sure consumers are ready to play their part and make up for that price increase. See fair-trade/organic food, which have not yet achieved the kind of scale that would drive the costs down. If you know for a fact that changing the process in a more humane/responsible/sustainable way doesn't have to mean dramatically increased end prices, please do share, it'd be good news for me.
Women who leave seem to think it's worse in tech. Pretty solid data point.
Unboxing in Guile
The Lego Monolith [video]
> a company well-known for its “Do no evil” culture

This was their motto a decade back and what they are doing does not reflect it even remotely. I'm pretty sure they are not known for "do no evil" culture, just that the slogan is tied to them somehow.
Dominic Sandbrook in his history of the 1970s, Seasons in the Sun, makes the point that the "every man for himself" attitude of some of the unions in the 1970s actually had more in common with Thatcherism than the old-school Labour types who gave us the NHS.
If possible - they should try and fix the C#/windows techempower implementations which are not anywhere near their results.
10 Influencers in Technology to Follow on Twitter
Less hassle? You have to renew it every a few months.
Inequality suggests people who are skilled to perform a job are not paid equally to others for similar skill sets. Is someone working your local fast food restaurant suffering from inequality compared to a software engineer earning ten times as much when one cannot ever hope to do the other persons job?

Besides pay one of the largest burdens the poor face are all the government fees and indirect taxes that most of us don't notice in our daily lives. That twenty dollar tag fee renewal to me is nothing, but if you have to have a car and aren't clearing much twenty bucks can mean beans and rice.

Government already has the ability to track all fees paid it directly and can make assumptions about indirect fees so that the working poor; far different from the non working poor; can be relieved of some of the burden.

The only other option for solving inequality as many bemoan is to take from those earning so much so they really don't see the point and eventually everyone ends up poorer.
Ah, I see things are working as planned. The upper middle class and lower feeling guilt at their salaries, even though it's just a pittance in the larger pool.

But I've been thinking about how much money I really need. I could have indulged in some expensive hobbies, but I can also get by with lesser equipment and practice the same hobbies, as long as I don't obsess over how "bad" that equipment is. And there are a lot of hobbies that either cost little to maintain, or that benefits other people. So there seems to be a lot of potential for reducing spending on oneself ones immediates and funneling some of it elsewhere (either through money, labour or time).
I probably would've felt more sympathy for her had it not been for the fact that upon scrolling down, she still has google listed as one of her former employers! now if being at google was such a traumatic experience, why reference them in your sexual harassment letter? If it happened to me, I wouldn't list the former employer I worked for.
I'm not going to speak directly regarding the way this individual handled this situation, but in general, if you experience any form of sexual harassment I highly recommend you speak with HR immediately following the incident. Don't allow it to escalate, things can only get worse. Even if it's your first day on the job, you should never feel speaking to HR regarding an incident is a bad idea.
Jimmy Cauty Model Village: the Aftermath Dislocation Principle
Probably relevant that Silicon Valley is disproportionately male vs. "all industries".
It's probably worse in all sectors where women are a small minority.
Four Nobel economists on the biggest challenges for 2016
Cool app; fun, simple to use. Clean interface
Hey, author of the article here. I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody's got any.
That's a pretty terrible data point because of how biased it is.

It's like saying that everyone who abandoned a certain film halfway says the film is bad and concluding that most people in general hate the film: your data points are coming from a group who almost exclusively hated the film in the first place: they're not representative of the entire population.
>Wonder what constitutes "Hate Speech"

It's anything that the people in charge find offensive.
Or they can help their parents fix agriculture, develop local businesses, etc. The way I see it, those factories employing child labour are their primary tether to the global economy, which is bleeding them dry. Disconnected, they wouldn't have to compete with the rest of the world, and local economy would adjust. After all, at the level their local economy is, it's not dollars that matter, but man hours - and every country has the same amount per capita of those.
You're supposed to renew them automatically from a monthly cron job.
I'm starting to think that I am (or we, men, are) blind to this. If it happens as much as is reported (I don not work in SV, but I'd guess Eastern-ish Europe would be worse), then it must happen before out eyes, or even worse, we are the ones doing it. I honestly can't think of such incident, but this suggest that there were many that I simply ignored, didn't see them as such.

edit: To make it clear, I definitely didn't witness incidents like kissing and lap sitting.. but more subtle ones might come under my radar.
Opportunities and Challenges of WebGL [video]
I expect things like the USA government does, such as surveil you and then when you take them to court say that you don't have enough evidence/standing to prove they did anything. Intelligence agencies monitoring is almost impossible to show if they use techniques like parallel reconstruction.
What kind of comparison do "they" have, though? And is it more than a couple of anecdotes amplified by the popularity of the medium they were posted on? Also consider we are on a tech site, so we are more likely to consume tech media which is more likely to report harassment of women in tech.
Tandem boss Ricky Knox on flashy apps and building a bank
This is your complaint? How silly.
>In that week, I was kissed on the cheek, asked to sit on my manager’s lap...
>Protect yourself and others. Report it to HR.

The correct response is to punch him in the face, defend your personal space with extreme prejudice.
Sounds like you found a good niche. Your work is solving real problems and you can make real money from your product, instead of just creating another VC subsidized ad platform that gets breathless hype in TechCrunch. I'd consider sitting tight for now, there is a sea change going on in the tech world and money is getting tighter. In the not too distant future you might find it easier to attract better talent.
It wasn't Google that harassed her, but one of of Google's employees.
Can you really trust HR to do the right thing?
That's not the slogan. It's "don't be evil."

"Don't do evil" is impossible for a corporation with 50k employees. "Don't be evil" is a worthy ideal to strive for.
$ # No need to use head. Also, I prefer output on one line.
$ shuf -n4 /usr/share/dict/words | xargs
limper mastoplastia highfaluting Bobbinite
The U.S. economy is geographically spread out and enormous. However, due to various historic reasons, the population is mostly focused at the coasts, and for other historic reasons, the north-west and north-eastern coastal areas are the wealthiest and densest. More people and more money means more demand and higher prices.

In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, minus some of the extras you'll find in the rich, dense, coastal areas (extras usually in the form of various culture and activities). However, due to the lack of local demand, the prices are lower.

This creates hugely variable economic conditions on the order of the differences between London/Paris and Budapest.

Housing, like anywhere, dominates living expenses after taxes $30k/yr income looks more like $22k/yr. There are single bedroom apartments, not fantastic, but pretty nice, around where I live that are $2k+/mo. Now you have no money for food, transport, clothing, hobbies, etc. You can find cheaper places for around $1.5k+/mo (there are no housing options here under $1200) but that still leaves you pretty thin with $4k left to spread across the entire year for other necessities.

On the other hand, in Omaha, Nebraska, I found some comparable apartments at $500/mo. Which gives you a little more than $1k/mo for the rest of the year. You'll probably blow through half of that on food and half of that on car expenses (cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options) and now you still have no money for savings or hobbies.

The median income in the U.S. is ~$54k/year (about the same as Europe but a hair higher). But that also means children, a couple income earners and so on.
The 10 Golden Rules of Productivity
A Whig History of CRISPR
The universal rate of sexual harassment of females is 31%[1]
in Silicon Valley it is 60%[2]. The restaurant industry is notorious for sexual harassment and their rate of harassment from superiors is 66%[3] - about par with Silicon Valley.

So, yes, it is a problem in Silicon Valley - and ignorance of the severity of the problem is a large part of the problem (you'll find a lot of research on sexual harassment in other industries but very little on tech and SV in particular).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20071018041054/http://www.sexual...

[2] http://elephantinthevalley.com/

[3] http://rocunited.org/pr-the-glass-floor-report/
The fraction of women in IT is very low, and has been for decades. That's the obvious, solid data point that most people seem to ignore.
Cute project I guess, but this is a terrible idea for the web.
Notable (Labour Party) left-winger Barbara Castle tried to address the problem of excessive Union militancy with a proposal "In Place of Strife" as early as 1969. It failed and the problems only got worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Place_of_Strife

So, instead of the Labour Party dealing with the problem it ended up being Thatcher's Conservative Party.

Let's just say, one extreme to the other.
Cheap Weddings Lead to Fewer Divorces
What an uplifting story. Sexual harassment is a serious problem affecting women all over the world. I'm glad that more and more people speak up.
In that week, I was kissed on the cheek, asked to sit on my manager’s lap, told about my manager’s sex life and virility, and told that “all men go through an Asian fetish at some time”

holy frack - that's insane - and no way the first time they've said these things in front of other people before with no-one challenging the behavior as unacceptable

easy guide for men: if you wouldn't say it to a friend's daughter, or someone saying it to your daughter, don't say it to any woman you aren't in a personal relationship
I assume you're kidding but if you're not: you run the risk of being fired for physical assault, whether or not you're in the right.

In any case, as reported in the article, people in that situation are more likely to be paralysed by shock and doubt. A blunt, self-assured response in the moment is unlikely.
You’ll be in for a flavory surprise
Hardware is high end 2009 workstations.

We as an organisation like to take our time. We wouldn't welcome a new joiner with a PC on his desk. Much more fun to see him struggling for weeks with our internal IT approval processes. We happily pay millions to Microsoft to get the privilege of using Windows Xp / 32 bit systems a little bit longer (I have now almost more RAM in my mobile phone than my workstation). In fact I suspect many of the critical infrastructures of the organisation are running on COBOL. We'd probably still use CRT screens if our IT department could source them. We are certainly still using blackberries (I hope they will stash enough devices before RIM goes bust).
I wonder how that works, mentally. Most doctors are, I suppose, reasonably intelligent, so I guess that most of them who take bribe-money would prescribe drugs that are from a different brand, just to avoid any suspicion.

(If pharma companies can deduce which brands are prescribed by which doctors, then perhaps there lies a problem we can easily solve.)
All the more reason why it's important to recognise it's a problem in Silicon Valley and to start fixing it. Leading is better than following, right?
Why does nobody seem to be bothered with the apologize and continue as usual outcome? Shouldn't there have been serious implications for the sexual offender?
Generative adversarial networks can do this much much better. Check out this blog post:

http://www.foldl.me/2015/conditional-gans-face-generation/

and the corresponding paper:

http://www.foldl.me/uploads/2015/conditional-gans-face-gener...
> The greatest trick in politics has been the ability to convince people to vote against their own interests.

This is more or less the argument Trump fans make when they argue for a border wall, tougher immigration laws, cracking down on Chinese trade, and other protectionist measures.

Wishing other people were smarter (like us!) is a terrible thought process and very closed-minded. It's part of the reason partisans talk about each other instead of with each other.