skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Where does it say the manager "wasn't telling male workers to wear long sleeved shirts?" Even if so, how's that sexist? To say that something's sexist because a man gets different advice than a woman with no context is unacceptable criteria for sexism.

I'm saying she was told to wear a long sleeve shirt. I find it exceedingly unlikely a man was told the same thing and she didn't hear about it (especially as the male employees were joking about it with her, it seems likely they would have told her). Hence, only she was told that, which is a sex based (a protected class) restriction on clothing.

> She's complaining about getting reprimanded for "working from home for one hour in the morning."

Something everyone else on her team did that day. You are right we don't have enough context. But I'm saying it's (reasonably) possible. Suppose she was the only female on the team (likely) and there was a male coworker who was also a similarly experienced junior dev (possible). If she is told not to work from home, but he is allowed to, she is told to work at his desk, he can work anywhere, she is told to work on thanksgiving, he is not... that is straight up sexism. Even without those conditions the tone of the emails could have also implied it in each of those instances (to be clear those instances are all reported by her, but her coworkers actions and identities are not).

So yes, it could be just a bad manager. But it sounds like she told HR a lot of times she thought it was sexism with no response. Regardless of if it was or wasn't sexism, HR did nothing. That puts the blame on Uber, rather than just a shitty manager. And that means Uber can't say whether it was or wasn't sexism, because they didn't bother enough to care to investigate it. All of which speaks poorly of Uber.
Most of my friends chat with either Google Hangouts or good old SMS
Arbitrary precision rationals increase in storage and processing time each time you multiply them, so they open you up to DoS attacks.

My order of preference:

* Fixed-point arithmetic: All-around safe, though you'll probably need to take a maintenance window later if you need extra precision.

* Floating point arithmetic: Sounds dangerous, but you can eliminate most of the risk using database checks.

* Arbitrary-precision arithmetic: Almost any place they're used opens you up to DoS attacks; it's very difficult to detect the problem. I'd ensure my database and application server have debugging symbols installed, replace libgmp with something that alerts by generating core dumps when a timing threshold is passed, use a language where backtraces are easy to read in gdb, and ensure that all arbitrary-precision arithmetic is written against gmp. I'm not sure what I'd do when I detected the problem though: If I truncated 1 + 1/(10^10)! to 1 to resolve the issue, it's equivalent to using floating point in the first place.
A corporation is an entity designed to take on risk for the benefit of the few.

The state is an entity designed to mitigate risk for the benefit of all, which ends up benefiting the few due to implementation problems
"Niemand hat vor eine Mauer zu bauen" :-)

Maybe that wall isn't for keeping Mexicans out?
Medicine is interdisciplinary.

Medicine requires engineering skills. Prosthetics? How about that metal plate holding a femur together? You think they buy that off the shelf at Wal-Mart? Engineering is without a doubt the worst counterexample you could have provided.

As for IT systems in medicine, just ignoring the digitizing of medical records, there are countless improvements that can be made in medicine at the IT level. If IT and research are completely partitioned and cannot interact, then they aren't considering the effect of IT on medicine. That means they're trending towards being a sub par institution.

And your facetious J&J example is still entirely applicable. Deunionization of support and janitorial staff has caused worse overall outcomes for hospitals. Considering how dangerous staph infections are in hospitals, you've provided another stupid example. I'd much rather go to a hospital with unionized and well paid janitorial services than one saving 20% in costs and profiting off of minimum wage janitors.

Your lack of imagination makes me hope you're not in charge of anything important.
You've clearly never tried to go cash-only. You feel the pain when you buy something; pulling out a credit (or even debit) card does not have nearly the same emotional angst.

Seeing those bills go away with the knowledge that they're not coming back is quite enlightening.
A great mentor that challenged all of my assumptions, taught me how to communicate (always ask _good_ quesions), taught me how to design code (pseudo coding is still an excellent design tool), and taught me how to complete projects.

That and just having a passion for writing code.
Yeah, every cop investigating every crime is on shaky ground and up to no good because they have Stingrays. That's quite the logical Deus Ex Machina.
"But the city's goal with these sting operations wasn't to catch and prosecute drivers/uber for previous trips."

Errr, sure it is. Their investigatory mechanism happen to be to try catch them on a trip they could prove originated in the city, giving them probable cause to stop them and ticket them.

This just happens to be easier to do as a sting.

"It was to catch them in the act for a single trip and prosecute them for that."

That is just the method, not the purpose of the investigation.

Your argument is what would be called "a distinction without a difference"

If the FBI is looking for illegal uranium sellers, and they try to buy/bust a low level guy as part of the investigation, it does not make the investigation about the buy/bust, it's still to catch and prosecute illegal uranium sellers.

Here, the investigation's goal was to catch and prosecute uber
drivers driving illegally.
In any case, it doesn't matter.

Remember "Obstruction may consist of any attempt to hinder the discovery, apprehension, conviction or punishment of anyone who has committed a crime. "

Not "the crime you are currently investigating", but any crime.

For example, oneo the the federal statute says:
"(a) Whoever willfully endeavors by means of bribery to obstruct, delay, or prevent the communication of information relating to a violation of any criminal statute of the United States by any person to a criminal investigator shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

(emph mine)

(Ignore the bribery part, there's a ton of these statutes,i'm just pulling out one)

"To use another analogy, if I'm a drug dealer and the cops try to buy drugs from me in a sting operation and I somehow figure out that they're cops and walk away before doing a deal is that obstruction of justice? Because I think that's basically what is (was?) happening here.
"

This isn't obstruction, but it's not what is happening here.

Imagine if the cops were investigating you for dealing drugs. They already had evidence you deal drugs. They ask your friend where you are, even just to talk to you, to try to get cleaner evidence, and he deliberately lies about where you are to protect you. Congrats, that's obstruction in a lot of jurisdictions. No sting reuired.

Here, the cops are asking the uber app where the drivers are. They know or have probable cause to believe the drivers have committed crimes (again, the sting part is just about having a very clean prosecution, it's not required or necessary here).
Uber deliberately lies about where the drivers are, with the purpose of protecting them from this investigation.

You can ignore the sting they were doing completely. The crime was complete the second a law enforcement officer, trying to investigate the crimes of an uber driver, opened the app in an attempt to find a driver (even just to talk to!) and got fake results.
Fake your way to art connoisseur with this ‘Shazam for art’ app
Greyball officially makes Uber the Zenefits of the ridesharing industry now.
yes it does. from a game theoretic perspective, it only would make sense for me to switch to cash if everyone else did so that the store wouldn't incorporate the extra fee into the price of their goods. However, one can't control others, they can only control their own behavior. So in a situation where there goods cost extra, because others are still using their cards and the owner has to markup prices, the only rational thing to do is to use the payment method you prefer. And economically speaking, all the cash users are paying extra for a good they don't use.
This is one of the very important ways in which dumb rules get fixed. Like, the prohibition on cannabis wouldn't have the support it does if we were really good at enforcing it - people need the experience with not-X to decide on supporting that policy.
If you want to learn a new language/platform, I'm just getting in deep with Mathematica/Wolfram Language now. It's pretty eye popping how much stuff you can do in a one liner with all those built in functions! Also has tightly integrated cloud stuff which makes it a no-brainer to deploy stuff. Already changed the way I approach MVPs and experiments
Happy to see more attention to this problem. The FSF called it out back in 2014, as well:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-techno...
Fix this enormous basel and ad support for 32GB memory and there will be no competition ...
Maybe not a popular opinion but I find this entire thing pure genius.

>I couldn't find a good source, but it doesn't seem like that's something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?

The first 6 digits of a credit card can identify the issuing bank (BIN number - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number). If you ask your merchant they can readily provide you and up to date list.

This plus public payroll records (such as http://transparentcalifornia.com/) probably took them quite far.
> This has got to be illegal

It doesn't seem that different from Cloudflare et al throwing up CAPTCHAs and blocks when I browse through Tor. Uber was trying to prevent abuse. Until someone identifies themselves as a city official or Uber is put on notice that it is under investigation, I think they are well within their rights to do this.
Are you saying it's not true for the males? In most big corporations you're required to ear a shirt and formal pants. Some require ties.
>> general American public does not enjoy quality

Even in midwest Trump country where I live atm I have my choice of three excellent craft brewers inside a five mile radius, operating for years now, the places are packed full of "general Americans" every single time I visit. The "general American public" is driving a $22 billion+ craft brewing market and nearly every podunk cow town big enough to have a WalMart also has a "brewing company" now. Tilt your head forward so your snoot isn't so high in the atmosphere and maybe you'll be able to spot some actual "general Americans" as opposed to the knuckle dragging rice beer drinkers you decorate inside your mind.

I've been through all the brew pubs in the Boulder/Fort Collins "Front Range" area as well. Never heard anyone so much as mention "Heady Topper." The story is just hype. Someone buffing up the trademark for a sale maybe.
Hi Jim! As it turns out, AJAX is immensely popular in Amsterdam, because it's the name of the local soccer team [1]. But they pronounce AJAX like "ah yax", and JavaScript like "ya va schkript"! ;)

[1] http://english.ajax.nl/streams/ajax-now.htm
Wow! Thanks so much for all the resources. I have added them to my notes.
>>Other techniques included looking at the user’s credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.

>I couldn't find a good source, but it doesn't seem like that's something a CC merchant would have access to. Do they really get to see that?

First 6 digits of any CC# is the Issuer/Bank Identification Number (BIN/IIN), and anyone can get access to that information.

Here is an online search tool: https://www.bincodes.com
Well, that "US way" has worked better than every other developed country in that respect, why not adopt it?
Does not work on mobile.
IANAL

It might be relevant if the person allegedly committing a crime and the person making the supposed crime harder to discover are the same person. In your case they are, in Uber's case they aren't (AFAIK).
Do you wear glasses by any chance? I haven't found a decent headphone that doesn't press the frame of my glasses to the point of giving me headache in the first hour.

I have a QuietComfort 15 and a Beyerdynamic DT-770-PRO-32. The Beyerdynamic is bigger and more comfortable on the ears, but puts more pressure so it's it hurts faster. The Bose is smaller and less comfortable on the ears, but lighter, so I can support it a bit longer.
Echoes of Palantir and downtown Palo Alto.
Except she "knew that when I got indefinite leave to remain I can't stay outside of the country for more than two years". This is what she, herself, said.

The title seems almost cynical when she could have avoided this whole ordeal had she followed procedure, which she admits she was familiar with.

Also, blaming this on "Brexit UK" is transparently inflammatory since the requests for leave were made, and rejected, a decade before Brexit was even a question.
How do you feel GitLab stacks up?
Although that same link also says:

"Although selected shops, petrol stations, railway stations and government services, each for their own reasons, have decided not to accept cash any longer, we do not foresee the Netherlands will evolve into a completely cashless society. In fact, the consensus is that the cash infrastructure will remain ubiquitous and that it is up to payers and payees to agree on their payment method."

That said, it's not hard to imagine that if you get to 90% or 95% cashless, a lot of retailers aren't going to want to bother with cash any longer.
Understanding Elixir Gradual Typing
Isn't it sci-fi-level incredible, and frankly both scary and shady, that every modern x86 CPU has this forced sub-ring-0 control program? And that the CPU vendors apparently go to extreme lengths in hiding its functionality? Why would even large vendors like Apple or Dell agree to this?

The 30-minute timeout is particularly mischievous. It's like they REALLY want to slow down any effort at patching out the ME.

Are we going to have to wait on an insider leak on what's the real deal here? Or have I completely missed out on a perfectly good excuse for what's going on?
EDIT: I was wrong about this, see comments below.

False. If you renounce it it's expensive and difficult to get it back, and but renouncing itself is free and unilateral.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-considerati...
They're pre-emptively choosing to obstruct enforcement of whatever laws they deem unacceptable. So that's quite a rosy expectation about their willingness to cooperate.
Pursue a CS degree?
I'm currently a law student looking for a career switch into engineering.

I have taken 6+ CS classes by now and I really enjoyed them. I'm not half bad at it. However given my resume, its been pretty difficult to get technology companies to give me a shot.

Im wondering if is worth pursuing a CS degree. I can probably get it done in 2 years. I can probably get into a fairly strong undergrad or graduate program in Canada.

Your thoughts would be appreciated!
... I confess I'm very frustrated reading about how trusted computing modules hurt the cause of FOSS but no alternatives to actually try and carry out cryptography to execute trusted code.

Inevitably the complaint is, "Well if they have physical access you're screwed anyways." And I just don't understand how anyone can maintain that farce when the last year has shown that it's a genuine challenge even for the US FBI to unlock a mobile device without the owners say-so and it's getting harder all the time.

If you truly believe that physical access is a trump of any security then you can never trust your hardware anyways, as it is exceptionaly hard to prove it conforms to a spec.
Postscript isn't a complex language. It's probably quite straightforward to translate it into Javascript and run it locally on a web browser, rendering into a canvas. With a websocket connection to the backend, it'd be possible to recreate NeWS and use it for traditional client/server Unix apps, but with an ordinary web browser instead of an X server.

I don't know whether this would be useful, mind, other than being a cool hack (which has value all of its own)... but it would be a very cool hack.

Is any of the NeWS source code available?
I think there is a deeper problem here with HR. Uber didn't care enough to figure out whether it was sexist or not (or even care enough to do anything about it at all). That means Uber is sexist simply by not caring enough to check (regardless of whether this was or wasn't sexism).

* As always a lot of caveats apply: If sexism is defined as legally culpable discrimination of a protected class (rather than looser social definitions, or even broader sociology definitions). If we take her statements at face value.
This is a dichotomy I reject. Laws should be evaluated on an individual basis, not as a body, otherwise you're logically obligated to be as bothered at people going 51 in a 50 as rape and murder.

On top of that, many laws are bogus, pointless, useless, more are actively harmful. Hell, Uber got a start by flaunting a law that had little actual use in the real world save for protecting monopolists with very flimsy pretenses. You probably flaunt the speed limit on a daily basis commuting to work because the alternative is less safe and less efficient for all concerned.

Let's not pretend that ignoring useless laws is a slight against some broader philosophical concept.
Unix was very popular in the mid 90s amongst some. There were half a dozen RISC unix vendors each investing $100m a year on their unix platforms to drive billions in new business. This was seen as one of the few insider critiques worth reading. It was a bit over the top and rant-t but there was some good insight in there. It wasn't such a devastating critique that it really shifted peoples opinions about unix.
How does this jive with the right to avoid self-incrimination?
As the lawyer in this conversation I'm gonna assume that you're right. Seems like a pretty broad law though. Seems like it could be an add on to almost any other criminal act as criminals almost always try to avoid getting caught one way or another.
press doesn't matter. all that matters is if they have money. you'd think people would realize the uselessness of bad press after Trump won.
WordPress with SQLite, bye MySQL
There is a legendary and possibly apocryphal quote from a music critic to the effect that "Only 5000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album - but all of them formed bands".

What they were was deeply influential. It's harder to see from a future viewpoint, but a lot of what they were doing broke new ground and informed decades of other acts directly.

A lot of it is also good stuff - have a listen to some of the suggestions in these thread.
My guess is that the approved tool the company allows to merely build a profile of the additional details necessary to provide additional 'white glove' style service to VIPs to ensure positive word of mouth occurs. Then they realized that they were seeing data that indicated that they were being watched a little closer by the .gov, and 'adjusted' the software to reject or process those people's Uber experiences differently.
> Respectfully, I don't think this blog post would get play if it didn't have the female-on-female sexism angle.

Probably entirely accurate.
Working on robotics software and learning new to me concepts like control loops was pretty fun.
Likely because there's no major consumer devices shipping them (or at least high-end versions of them) that could help them hit a scale that brings the cost down, which makes them less viable for a general public consumer standpoint, which means there's less time spent optimizing it.

I remember a wihle back when Google was shopping around for Intel replacements (likely a negotiation tactic), people were saying they should buy the POWER division from IBM (IIRC). That would have been really interesting...
bubble-vision. Whatsapp was pretty much messaging standard in South America, non-UK Europe, Russia and non-China SE Asia and I bet those were not majority iOS markets then nor now.
We don't, that i know, have family rooms or dens in the UK, but i have always been a bit confused by the possibility of both living rooms and sitting rooms. There are also lounges, of course, but the kind of people who have lounges certainly don't have sitting rooms. To say nothing of drawing rooms.

There's actually quite a good gallery of British living rooms through the ages in the Geffrye Museum in London, starting from back when they were called parlours. The main thing i remember about it is that the Victorians had fantastically poor taste in interior decoration.
JetSmarter tries to extort journalists for positive coverage
Remove the character limit and stop banning/censoring political opponents.
And a better question than that is: should a corporation be picking and choosing which laws they follow and which they don't?
It's a good thing nobody has access to machines that can rapidly perform repetitive tasks.
A bit of compassion for someone fleeing the war would be appropriate.
Are there any projects out there that throw the baby out with the bathwater and just restart computing from the ground up with freedom as a foundation? I'd love to participate something like that and I think it'd be a great way to respark 80's like hacker movement.
Learning a functional language.
Shoe face?
Why would you need write Uber a letter? Don't like it, don't use it.

You don't have a say in government like you do with a private company. If I don't like the government, I have to hope that millions of other people agree with me. If I don't like a company, I alone can choose not to associate with it. My relationship with or without Uber is entirely up to me. I'm forced to endure the government whether I like it or not -- I could petition and protest until I'm blue and it won't make a difference to my life unless millions agree. With Uber, etc. I can simply stop buying their product and poof! They're out of my life.
Not sure I read it that way, but okay. But that reading requires you to ask "why", and sometimes it feels very much like the government lost the consent of the governed a looooong time ago..
In the US, riding in a taxi has never been ridiculously expensive, and it has not gotten any cheaper on account of Uber.

Moreover, Uber did not create a business to offer affordable rides to the middle class. They created a business to offer the sort of luxury that titans of industry who have private drivers experience, to people willing to pay for that service.

What Uber did do is make the 'car on demand' idea functional and ubiquitous. But A) they didn't do it legally and B) it turns on the 'on demand' part matters more to customers than the 'luxury' part.

So today, because rides are subsidized, you can summon a car and be driven around for what seems like quite a bargain. But subsidies are pretty much the opposite of 'product market fit'.

This news appears to be a clear-cut example of Uber not only breaking the law, but of obstructing justice to protect their illegal operations from enforcement of the law. I think that ought to be looked upon contemptuously.
I was disappointed to see they offer the deprecated version of Swift but no Kotlin
Because as much as HN praises the notion of passive income streams, widespread parasitism by monopolistic and unproductive sectors of the economy are an anchor on the broader, actually-productive economy.

The payment card industry is a parasite on all of us, full stop.
What tech companies are actively hiring in the San Diego metro area?