skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Seat 31B" is the name of the blog. If you look at the image at the top of the page, it apparently refers to a seat number in economy class.
The idea is that at least one of the founders should have some specialty in the field they are disrupting.
"Also, an inevitable question when going through security checkpoints in some countries is "did you pack your own luggage". I assume that if you answer "no", you'd be subjected to a very thorough search for bombs or contraband."

Yeah, but that's actually probably not the biggest problem here. A thorough search for bombs is just that - a thorough search. Some people are selected randomly for this kind of search. Unless you're actually carrying a bomb (and that is one thing this company does say it protects against), then you shouldn't have to worry about this.

(Although all the other things said against them seem exactly right to me, so I'm not in any way endorsing them.)
I can attest to this. I was a systems engineer for a (In-Flight Entertainment System) company and I can't count the amount of hours I have held a plane in the air just to read the bits over the ARINC bus from the FMS. No documentation.
“Are couriers covered by Common Cartier rules?”

There isn’t much need for anything beyond 3 characters:

“Yes” or “No”

If you asked FedEx that question, there isn’t a legal department response needed. It’s a simple “Yes.”

Also, that question – the public has a right to a clear answer.

“Do your cars have seatbelts?”

“Does your food contain salt?”

These are examples of questions that don’t have gray areas worthy of “legalese.”

If legalese is required that means the expected answer isn’t the same as the actual answer.
so you're saying they are trying to get suckers to take all the risk (unknowningly), and profit off that themselves!
I do hope that these methods get patched, I tend to archive my bookmark collection with chrome headless to prevent loosing content when such a site goes offline. I hate it when a website requires me to play special snowflake to scrape them for this purpose.
I’m a closeted conservative in tech, hence the throwaway account. Some of what the manifesto said is overly broad or wrong headed, in particular at least from my perspective generalizing views held by conservatives on climate change and similar issues, but one thing in particular stood out:

The left and by extension Google do not tolerate diversity of viewpoint or worldview. Diversity of race or sex is viewed as critical but real diversity, that of the lens through which people view the world is to be stomped out with prejudice. If you don’t agree with the leftist secular view you are a bigot. If you are religious you must apologize for your bigotry and convince others it is only a social activity or something private that won’t affect how you behave or what you believe in other spheres.

As a conservative orthodox Catholic and a devotee of Saint Josemariá Escrivá, I feel like I have to hide my faith and my views. If people understood that my devotion to doing my work as perfectly and as generously as I can is driven by my desire to serve God and mankind they would be shocked and disappointed. Even worse, my views on the existence of an absolute unchanging morality would be viewed as bigotry even though I don’t advocate discrimination and am willing to happily work beside those who believe and practice differently. It is not enough that we work side by side and treat each other with respect, I must believe and accept leftist dogma in my heart or I am a bigot and I am unfit to write code, work with others, or function in a management role.

From my perspective the exclusion, demonization and intolerance from the left for those who dare to merely believe and live their own lives differently is terrifying. I don’t know how we come back from the current state of things to a liberal, open society where diversity of belief and viewpoint is prized.
It's the name of the site, he explains it on the about me page, http://www.seat31b.com/why-another-travel-blog/
It's no different than a guy in the NBA wondering out loud if the bias towards men might have a biological component, so that even if the systemic barriers are removed, we might expect far different than 50/50 female/male in the NBA. But no one thinks that - it's obviously silly because physical attributes are so obvious.

So we'll use Wikipedia as a perfect summary of all the research on this topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...

"significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%."

But certainly that study and all the others are just wrong, or they're measuring the wrong thing and it's not applicable to software.

I dunno, perhaps the ratio should be 45/55 once the systemic bias is removed. Or maybe it's 55/45 - maybe the systemic bias is beyond terrible and males are worse at software and we've got it all backwards. Doesn't seem like there's anything supporting 50/50 other than some weird notion that everyone's not physically equal at all, but somehow our brains are.
The trouble is that, whilst it's easy to determine whether or not the person stood next to you is shorter than you, competence is something far harder to assess. If your opinion is 'women are, on average, less competant', it would seem more likely than not that your default position would assume the woman stood next to you is less competent.
I think the sweet spot is to not outright lie in users faces (which could definitely lead to a bad first impression and hurt your chances at eventually converting your leads into actual users), but rather build your landing page with a CTA that reads something like "Interested? Leave your email here and we'll let you know when it's ready.", instead of faking a user creation process and breaking the news to them at the end of the process.

Though depending on your appetite for twisting the truth, you could also make it sound like you've already built the product, but it's currently in an invite-only private beta phase, and lead the users into thinking they're signing up for the private beta by leaving their email. This might be a bit more effective, and isn't technically an outright lie unless you end up seeing lackluster interest and decide to ditch the product idea.
This makes me super curious about the pre flight baggage controls. How do they handle someone who picks up the extra bag, but winds up not taking the flight?

With baby formula, i'd just return the bag and apologize, eating the $99. Heroin on the other hand, i could probably move at a steep discount. $1k or so, not worth the risk. $10 or $20k? hmm. The bag needs to be worth at least $1000 in the target country, just to break even.

it seems like pretending to be a stoner, and setting up enough to buy a plane ticket could get you a lot of money for $99. Fake id and a prepaid credit card aren't that hard to come by. It's not like the ID needs to pass TSA inspection, as you're not taking the flight.

Seems like a very risky business. If your customers are willing to be pasties, it'll be ok. but just a couple of sharks completely change the risk profile. Doing stuff that precludes government enforcement of contracts is just crazy crazy risky.
You think the DoD would stand by and do nothing while a completed unidentified military surveillance plane circled a major city for days? Whatever this thing is doing, it's cleared at a high level. Maybe the people answering the phones for journalists don't know.
I might partially or totally disagree with the original manifest, but this reply is repulsive. I would never want to have a "senior" like this.

So much emphasis on how senior he is, how junior you have to write something so wrong. How OP's career is over. The 3rd point reads like navy seals copypasta but with HR instead.

If you don't see any other way to deal with OP's views than described in this belittling rant, than you are no more senior than he is.

And a minor nitpick about this rant's top highlight:

>Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers.

This is a non-statement. Replace 'engineering' with science, medicine, finance, customer service, politics, retail, programming etc., and it will sound as correct.
I'm not taking any sides here on the main debate! Quite the minefield!

But I did want to point out that a lot of The Black Swan - was about berating "other economists and their flawed theories". I feel he tries a lot to make it clear that he isn't an economist...

But I haven't read enough books on economics to know if this is what all economists like doing to each other.

PS: I really enjoyed that book and tried to absorb many lessons from it, but I gotta say "pop-risk" is a funny nickname for it.
That's how I think of it. So according to IPSAS accounting in 2013, Greece's debt is 18% of GDP. If they could raise that much money, they could be debt free, assuming political will.
> There's no way we can be absolutely correct in emotional diagnosis, just the same as we cannot always be in the black when speculating on the stock market. There's too many factors at work and they'll never (rarely) align in the same pattern.

In the real world, nothing ever aligns in the same pattern. That only happens in mathematical models. That doesn't mean we can't use language to describe those phenomena.

In the real world, we also can never be never be "absolutely certain" of anything, beyond maybe something Cartesian. That doesn't mean we can't make judgments about our surroundings.

> While unconsciousness is just the brain's autonomic functions, like encoding memory and recalling your multiplication tables.

Why are you assuming that the difference between what's "automatic" and "not automatic" in the brain is well-understood, and fundamentally distinct from the concept of consciousness?
Your "personal attack" is text from https://www.airmule.com/about/ under "Meet the Cofounders".

Makes you confident about Airmule?
"You’ll find me sitting in the middle seat, all the way in the back,
next to the toilets, but smiling the whole way because that seat was
ridiciculously cheap or even free!"

It's the premise for the travel blog. The author describes it as "the worst possible seat in economy class", but at least it's cheap!

http://www.seat31b.com/why-another-travel-blog/
The site promotes cheap travel and I think 31b is usually one of the cheaper seats on a plane.
How would we ever know if men actually were worse than women at math? There will always be a sufficient number of confounding variables as to have plausible deniability, not that it really matters. I think the line for when we're grasping at straws (or when we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion) is different for different people, which is why there is debate over such stupid things in the first place.
Here's enough TLDR so that my comment makes sense: In the tropics, the distinction between agriculture and hunter-gathering less sharp than in temperate climates. Thus early signs of tropical agriculture (from 20-30 kyears ago) pre-date the traditionally understood rise of agriculture about 9 kyears ago).

This confirms my Sri Lankan bemusement at the term "temperate climate". The tropics can be a PITA in many ways, but they have no shortage of biomass. Subsistence gardens abound and are productive. Even more than in other gardens, the issue is less to make things grow, but to stop the wrong things from growing. It's hardly surprising if ancient jungle dwellers long ago to tilted nature's bounty in their direction.

But I do take exception to the somewhat hippy-dippy claim that ..."colonial, industrial societies" came from outside the tropics and tried "to practice monoculture, pastoralism, and urbanism within them." Those "evils" took place in the tropics for thousands of years before western colonialists turned up.
Animation showing the system, from the manufacturer: http://www.envacgroup.com/ (Skip to 1:25 mark.)
When I worked at a large bank we had mandatory classes in the company values, and adherence to the values was explicitly measured in annual appraisals.
It is rejecting the premise of the question. Airmule isn't a common carrier, so engaging with a line of questioning that presumes they are a common carrier is a lose/lose situation - the sort of questioning sometimes caricatured as "when did you stop beating your wife".

Rightfully so, too. The blogger clearly chose his very unfriendly angle. Of the few actual quotes from the company are statements such as on-board couriers being an established industry, both FedEx and UPS being in that industry and all shipments complying with customs. If the blogger was genuinely interested in informing his readers, diving into those statements would be interesting, but he seems to reject them out of hand, preferring instead to pursue a "gotcha" question about common carrier status.
Quite often I looked at it and saw a Pentagon. Also using the loose hexagone definition, you could probably retrofit it on any point in time anyway :D
That's a bit interesting, what WOULD you do to model this?
You could in theory have a zvol exported from a ZFS pool on FreeBSD to Linux via some remote block dev protocol. iSCSI comes to mind, as it would have to be cross platform. Then slap ext4 on top of that in Linux.

The idea feels "janky" though. Lots of overhead compared to just running ZFS on Linux.
> If you accept there's no EQ then why not apply the same logic to IQ?

But that has been done, over and over again. By the established standard of "how to measure mental things", IQ is a very useful concept, while EQ is not.

The argument Peterson (and a few others) are making is that there is no incremental validity of EQ compared to other personality traits. That just means that EQ cannot explain more variance than these personality traits + IQ. Therefore, it is a useless concept. (I tend to agree with this argument.)

Describing mental capacity with a number is pretty straightforward, actually. You can test it yourself: Read 2 random digits. Immediately repeat them. Then do that for 3, 4, and so on. There will be a number (typically between 5 and 7) when you cannot repeat the sequence without error anymore.

There you have it: A measure for mental capacity.

If you really think IQ is garbage, how come we can ask people some weird questions, and actually predict based on these questions how successful they will be at age 40? In social science, there are few if any instances where there is such a strong connection between a measure and an outcome.
It would also seem that if we actively prohibit this line of enquiry we will never actually learn to accurately measure "competence" or "empathy", let alone enable humans to recognize those traits in others.

Measurement is key to understanding!

About the only "lie" in this debate (in so far as I can tell) is that we are all the same!

Sure - at some very high level of abstraction it may be "true". But as engineers, surely we understand that failure stems from false assumptions?
How hard is it for the author to say "I'm writing a piece on you and would like some clarification on some points"?

He never told them he was writing a piece and gave them a chance to read it or comment, AFAICT.
Uh, yes? I'm saying if we somehow magically determined that group A had 10% benefit than group B at a task, then we should expect to see more of group A represented, even if their populations are equal.

Exactly like we expect to see certain phenotypes over-represented in basketball.

Despite the difficulty, saying it's hard but it just must be true that everyone's equal doesn't seem like a robust approach. Or is Google saying it just has zero way of evaluating a person's work? Perhaps they could do blinded code reviews or something.
> Notice that only the last sentence attempted to actually critique the current design. Every single word before that was absolutely useless. [... ] the excerpt doesn't even present a weak argument for why boarding passes should be redesigned

It does? ~"The information important to the passenger does not stand out." The introductory rant may not suit your taste, but it can be a pleasant reading for people who don't feel personally offended by it. And, in my opinion, for a blog post, the signal to noise ratio is actually pretty good.
They are - greenhouse gases do affect the entire planet.
I came across a lot of socially maladjusted geniuses. If you try to put them in the wrong environment with the wrong assignments, bad stuff happens.

If you are able to manage them well, and let them do low level technical stuff, you can get amazing things out of them.
>Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations. People’s movements in general, however, are tremendously variable.

Variable and yet really similar. There are general patterns and, as with all patterns, there are exceptions.

Years of experience with one person are not useless with another. Not as useful but helpful nonetheless.
Even if he answered that question directly, I still think it wouldn't be enough as material to base a story on. How hard wouldn't it have been for "the journalist" to reach out for the co-founder for an interview?
WebKit is starting development on service workers
It's completely unreasonable to take a critique on hiring practices or a broad statement about demographics personally. I'm not going to take offense to the statement that men tend to be more aggressive than women. Likewise, if someone claims that Google's policy of favoring elite schools leads to hiring underqualified candidates, would Googlers from MIT suddenly be offended? Of course not. However, that's precisely what you're suggesting with women.
Quite the opposite. Yuval Harari explains really well in Sapiens that one of the keys to human success has been the ability to "do things together" at larger scales than any other species. For example, maritime trade going back millenia. That is true social "trust" in each other. The whole concept of money being a social construct is a very interesting thing to consider.
From the comments, it appears that that's what they're doing:

> The origin of the CPU-count dependence is that NOVA divides PMEM into per-CPU allocation regions. We use the current CPU ID as a hint about which region to use and avoid contention on the locks that protect it.

> So moving from a smaller number of CPUs to a larger number of CPUs just means more contention for the locks. Moving from a larger number to a smaller number is no problem at all. So, our current plan is to set the CPU count very high (like 256) when the file system is created.
So, they claim they can have the cake and eat it too - as in, ship the bag as non-personal carrier stuff to avoid prison, and ship it as personal non-carrier stuff to pass customs. Bold.
Wow, so many wrong things with this answer...

Of course, it would not surprise me to learn that measuring IQ as a predictor for success (or at least what a measurer defines as success) is much more accurate than "measuring" EQ for the same purpose. It makes sense - IQ is demonstrably measurable while EQ is some vague concept "popularized by a journalist". However, to go from this to a broad statement that there is no such thing as EQ is just silly. You could just as well say that there's no such thing as beauty because there is no accurate test to quantify it.

For a simple demonstration that EQ is an important quality for prediction of "success", just think of all the successful people you know and ask yourselves whether you think they would be as successful if they had the emotional makeup of an 8 year old.

This Quora answer has too much of a "trust me, I'm an authority" vibe to it

edited: ok, removed stuff that upon reflection does not contribute to the discussion - my apologies for that. The main point however stands. The repeated claims of no such thing as EQ should be qualified with "in the field of psychology" - in that case, I have no objection to the answer.
Totally agree. BTW, thanks for signify it is an awesome system for pkg signatures. It took me a while to get it working correctly for automatic pkg signing but once it all clicked together, the system was simple as any I've see!

ps. The best documentation I've found, was the manpage[1].

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/signify
I'm not sure if this is what you're talking about but my reaction to this whole "diversity debate" is that I think it's a simple result of tech (software) having become (MUCH) more people-centered. My impression is that 20, 30, 40 years ago software, like most engineering, was almost entirely associated with systematizing - but with the rise of the Internet, mobile, social networks and the increased emphasis on product development and presentation, tech has increasingly become not just people-centered but is itself now seen as an endeavor central to the interests of all modern citizens of society. This explains why there are more women now who are interested in tech, and also why there are so many non-technical women who want to break other women into tech.
The cult of Evan: What life is like inside Snap right now
I agree completely. In fact, I'd wager every time customs hears the name it's bound to trigger further scrutiny, even if subconsciously.
Archive and restore or transfer to new media.
> this is a belief that women are inherently less capable than men at software engineering

Should we therefore assume that women are equally capable as men at running the 100 meters, or at playing football? Don't get me wrong, I'm a male and probably half the women my age run faster than me or play football better than I do. But you know that this doesn't generalise: on average, men are faster runners and better football players. And you're ready to admit that because the thing is unequivocally measurable. Nonetheless, you consider any statement about gender differences that are not as easily measured as unthinkable and unacceptable. How is that?

edit: downvoters, please care to answer my question. I'm interested in your opinion.
Does anyone have a link to the data (which is only mentioned once in the article).
>What is frustrating in this one as well is that sidestepping the regulations is putting the 'gig contractor/employee/worker' in tremendous risk without giving formal training.

This sounds like the basis for the entire "sharing economy".
Excellent point. I often contrast myself against my brother. I'm in STEM, he's a creative. I love Snickers, he can't stand nuts in his chocolate. I don't use social media, he's a social butterfly. Both of us base our "personality" at least to a certain degree, by comparing against each other. I wonder if either of us was an only child, if we'd still be as divergent.
I see, schrödinger companies. The answer to a question (that isn't any company secret but a simple question) is totally different depending on you being a client vs. being a journalist.
> People do argue that women should not be in tech

At least pretend that you don't have a completely blinkered view of the world.
While those are technically quotes, it looks like they're there just for the Medium author to mock them.
Location: Riga, Latvia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: java, distributed systems, machine learning

Resume/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TbFTBIiat372mZ6hW7coNBha...

Email: post@kiril.me

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmenshikov

GitHub: https://github.com/kiril-me/
"We'll pay you to take this bag on the airplane for us.".

Yeah...nah.
Nice. I was picturing one more like a spiral staircase though, where the inner edge of each step touches an inner pole.
Uh, yes?

I think you mean "no" here, right? Because discrimination means making decisions based on gender, not on individual characteristics.

Also your other comments seem to means you support Google's pro-diversity approach then, right?

They aim to give equal opportunities to a more diverse set of people. They don't force hiring from under-represented classes.