skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it should be ok to pose a theory without subjecting yourself to a potential witch hunt.

That theory is that a large portion of your coworkers are unfit for the job because science. And they were only hired because of misguided politicking.
Yes, there was misrepresentation.

Google's CEO said: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”

He said no such thing. This is a cruel smear. Google, including its CEO and VP of Diversity & Newspeak, acted like thugs.

And no, this has nothing to do with at-will employment. It has to do with hypocrisy. Google claimed they be open and tolerant, and then they proceeded to directly contradict that ethos by firing Demore and viciously lying about him on the way out the door.
It's annoying, sure, but I unchecked a couple checkboxes once and haven't thought about it since.
I think he clarifies this. Two things are germane:

1. Google is "more than just a company." It is more like an old style company-town by now.

2. They are the gatekeepers of all information ever. Perhaps we should hold them to different standards, especially when it comes to opinions and ideologies?
It is ok to fire someone if they don't align with the company's opinions in CA. It really is.

Advertisement: Progressive myself.
Yeah but it seems like Google was just a bad cultural fit for him anyway. He should have applied at Uber or something.

Edit: Too soon?
"I wish there was an option to set it once and never see third-party seller items again."

This is my biggest issue by far as a customer of Amazon.

I have zero interest in buying anything off Amazon that isn't Amazon fulfilled with Prime shipping because virtually 100% of the reason I use Amazon is the quick, predictable shipping. While they do have various filters to show only prime-listed stuff in search results, the system is real fucky and you still end up getting into situations way too often where you are seeing items that can only really be bought through third parties (eg. the same SKU sells on Prime and via third party, so it makes it through the filter, but the prime option is sold out).

My enjoyment of using Amazon as a buyer would increase by like 100% if I could just tell it to act like anything not available through Prime just doesn't exist to me.
That depends on what you mean by "most."
To clarify: you are aware that, prior to the memo, Google already a lawsuit on their hands from the Department of Labor with regards to alleged gender discrimination?
> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.

Why? What use is intelligent discourse to the work that Google does?
Probably has many alts.
That article contains no direct quotes.
Don't forget to mention Google wouldn't hand over the data the Department of Labor demanded.
"he disseminated a company wide memo criticizing the company-wide hiring practices in a preachy way that didnt leave room for the company to answer back."

Not true, he distributed the memo on a mailing list called "skeptics."

I would like to hear from someone at Google what kind of discussions happen on the "skeptics" list. Have there have been any negative stereotypes about Christians voiced on that mailing list, for instance? Was political discussion normal on that mailing list? Was criticism of Google normal?
They let you change payment methods now after you've ordered something, as well as have a number of different cards in their system at a time. Not sure this is a problem anymore.
No misrepresentation? Like Sundar Pichai and the media conveniently conflating neurosis with the completely unrelated theory of neuroticism? Search "Google memo neurosis" and see how many headlines contain "neurosis" when that word or concept was never referred to even once in the 10 pages.
I had a similar issue (account didn't authorize a SEPA ELV transfer, so it bounced), and I just had to send the payment + 6,50€ to amazon via SEPA wire transfer, and they reopened it.
SC existed fine without labels. Most of the music underground that SC originally hosted for was micro-labels and independent producers. Soudncloud as a platform was NEVER a good fit for mainstream music as published by Hollywood labels, and I think much of the site's woes are because they tried to make it fit.

Soundcloud needs a blanket "no music published by a major label is permitted" There are of course copyright issues on remixes/whatnot but those really needs to be worked out in a court of law, in favor of producers.
What will happen next though?
Setting this particular issue aside, this really is a weird phenomenon that I don't quite understand, yet. So, a lot of people are condemning you on Twitter? I understand that as humans we don't like that feeling, but if you don't react to it nothing happens.

Why don't more people take that path?
If the memo was against the code of conduct, why did they wait one month to take action?

A better response from HR would have been to tell him: "this may violate our code of conduct - could you please take it down for the moment while we discuss amongst HR".

This could have turned into a reasonable internal discussion than a media circus.
Could you provide any more information about this trend, and how they are making a greater effort?
Game of Thrones drama, not action, spikes heart rates on Apple Watch app
> jumps to some misguided conclusions

Yet as much as people keep saying this, few seem to be able to really make the case. Just "I'm sure someone can explain why he's wrong" - in this case some random "sociology researcher" is supposed to be able to do so.

> this woe is me shtick

He lost his job for expressing the "wrong" opinion. I think that is wrong. why are you downplaying this, and trying to make a show of your indifference?

> reaching out to the alt-right publications

Who should he have reached out to? WSJ seems fine to me.
I agree the title should be 'is common ownership evil'... because as is clear from the article itself, large individual shareholders like Berkshire Hathaway will still have these hypothetical incentives. Picking on index funds merely criticizes regular folks' only access to the power of diversification not diversification generally.

That said, I think diverse common ownership is probably less risky than concentrated common ownership due to collective action problems in the former that don't exist in the latter. E.g., if 10k people commonly own 25% of each airline, it's a lot harder for them to push for collision than if a single fund owns 25% of each airline.

Regardless, very interesting article.
>It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations

It's been implied that this is an intentional means of keeping engagement low, as the quality of comments tends to diminish over time, while the likelihood of flamebait and spam increases as comment distance diverges from the root. This is also apparently the reason there are no notifications for new comments. I don't know if it's true or one of those features the community is reading too much meaning into, which only exists as it does because pg wasn't interested in expanding on it.

In any case, I really hope they consider adding more ways to sort the threads - sorting by time rather than karma would be very helpful. They could even keep the karma sort the default so no one else has to complain about the layout changing.
> Here's another bummer: why are citizens forced to pay for the social security that is provided by the government to Amazon? For example police, roads and the airports that are the key parts of the infrastructure that are making Amazon work?

There is so much wrong with this statement. Amazon pays usage fees for everything you suggest.

Roads? Amazon pays a tax on gasoline which pays for the roads. As do all citizens and businesses. The tax is a usage tax in that Amazon pays more if it uses more than you and I (which it does).

Police? Amazon pays property taxes which funds local governments.

Airports? Federal and local authorities levy usage taxes for air traffic control, security, and other airport functions. Next time you book a budget flight, look at the line item break down. I've had flights where the taxes were greater than the fare itself (CLT -> ORL).

Amazon (and all businesses) bear the burden of collecting sales taxes. It doesn't magically go to the government. Amazon has to construct systems to collect, manage, and send sales taxes to their respective local governments. The government receives these taxes with no effort on their part.

Bottom line... Citizens and companies pay usage taxes to maintain infrastructure.

> I don't see why Amazon is the only company privileged to grow. The only reason they are capable of operating right now (as in - on their low margins) is the sheer size they had reached by this time - and they are going nowhere but towards becoming the sole monopoly in the sector.

They're not, many companies could and many companies do invest heavily in themselves. You're on HN, you should notice these strategies being used by every startup.

Side note: Amazon is not a monopoly power. They have many competitors across a lot of market segments.
I think this is the problem:

Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Google may ingratiate itself into all these parts of your life but really it only wants one thing: your work. Damore fell into the illusion that Google really was a way of life, that they ever really cared about a political debate. They don't. It's just a company. Keep your political opinions out of the workplace.
Are you familiar with the phrase, "false equivalency"?
I was going to say this. I bought a treadmill on Amazon, it arrived without the console. Dealing with customer support by email was an exercise in frustration with agents clearly not actually reading my emails and sending out form responses. Once I called, everything was solved very quickly.
https://medium.com/@adljksbvkj/heres-your-point-by-point-ref...
I come from a similar background as the author - BS/MS in Stanford CS, but I left just as the deep learning craze was booming.

Stanford allows undergrads to propose and teach some of these more "practical" courses for upcoming technologies - a few examples are classes for NodeJS, cryptocurrency, Spark, and this one for Tensorflow. It's student-lead, very hands-on, and intended to give a specific industry experience.

The classes the author mentioned are first year pre-requisites for the AI specialization and doing research at labs, and gives enough background for a student to be instructive when explaining concepts such as perceptrons and svm's, without necessarily the mathematical rigor. This is the level needed to interact with Tensorflow.
> they only fire people with opinions that do not match those of the majority.

No, they only fire people that boiled media. For Sundar, it doesn't matter what the guy actually wrote, what matters is what media wrote about it. And they pictured him as a misogynist. So that is the new truth, now deal with it.
It is reasonable to assume that safety is the primary concern for school buses.
There are are a lot of safety standards.

"Pursuant to these requirements, federal safety regulations applicable to bus manufacturers have been developed. There are a total of 37 federal motor vehicle safety standards that apply to school buses. Many of these also apply to other types of motor vehicles, but several (among them standards 131, 220, 221, and 222) are written specifically for school buses."[1]

As for seatbelts,

"Large school buses are heavier and distribute crash forces differently than passenger cars and light trucks do. Because of these differences, bus passengers experience much less crash force than those in passenger cars, light trucks and vans."[2]

It seems that even weight[3] is a safety consideration.

[1] https://www.cga.ct.gov/2004/rpt/2004-R-0730.htm
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/road-safety/school-buses
[3] http://www.americanschoolbuscouncil.org/love-the-bus/educato...
I personally find the whole "Goolag" thing ridiculous. I've had relatives (great grandparents/uncles/aunts) in the USSR who were removed from their homes in the middle of the night by the government. One was even shot/killed.

Getting fired from your high-paying job to go off and get another high-paying job, after you spent numerous hours writing some controversial BS about women/hiring instead of, you know, doing your actual job, is not anywhere close to the type of persecution people have faced in the past - so let's please not pretend it is.
That doesn't seem to make sense. Favicons tend to be the website logo, making it easy to pick out the tab when you have multiple open. The favicon tells you the site, the tab title tells you the page.
It's a real problem that you can't tell the difference between what people do on their own time outside of work, and what they do at work, in a work forum.

If JD had posted his diatribe online on his own personal blog, there'd be a lot of discussion about it but he'd probably still be employed at Google.

The problem is that he posted his diatribe on a company forum. Legally, he forced the company to fire him and refute his words or else be treated as adopting his words as their own. (And yes, that is how workplace harassment laws work in the US. If you have a problem with that, take it up with Congress, not Google.)
You're being persuaded by anecdotal evidence. At the volume of sales Amazon makes, fraud is but a tiny fraction. The probability of your next purchase to be a fraudulent one is minuscule.

Not saying fraud isn't an issue, and there's certainly room for Amazon to improve in that area and keep it at bay even more, but I think the reason they don't do what you say is probably that they k ow the numbers, if they see a million third party purchase, and only 1000 were fraud, its not really cause for killing the other 990000 sales.
>doesn't load me up with ads

Unclick some textboxes, better yet use one of the myriad scripts to do it for you

>phones home

Like Windows 7 since they backported all the telemetry to it?

>or installs applications I did not explicitly request and consent

Like Windows 7 bloatware? Uninstall it
He may not be the best example, but there are others who have been bitten by things as trivial as "routing data through U.S. servers" (including through a CDN).

So I guess the lesson here is: don't do that.
Kids Should Know How to Code
Apple at Home Advisor: Work from Home with Apple
I agree. Amazon could also ban third-party for certain classes of items or make it harder to be a seller of those items. Camera equipment is notoriously fraud prone, and was before Amazon was even a thing.

I only buy used camera equipment from B&H or Adorama, and even with new equipment I am very cautious on Amazon. I tried getting used lenses a few times on Amazon and every single time the first order was the wrong, cheaper version of the lens I paid for. Amazon always quickly sent the right one, but I'd rather not deal with hassle. Particularly, since at that price point B&H or Adorama both have free shipping.
Because his piece is filled with logical errors, makes a big noise about reason and logic while citing evopsych nonsense which isn't regarded as actual science?

I mean, beyond any discussion of his ideology, the memo is laughable trash.
Arch Linux is best Linux!
Yes, as stated in the article, it is basically Moments.
Once it's published, it makes sense to just take it off either way.
I'm amiable enough to be polite and say "you're entitled to your opinion".
> They could've had a spine and supported intelligent discourse. Seems like a leadership problem.

That's not really how things work in companies. In a University? Sure. In a company that doesn't really make sense and is far too idealistic.

Regardless of whether you support the contents of the memo or not, he created a disruption within the company. A disruption that made some feel alienated and others vindicated. This is not where you have any type of discourse. This is a simple "fire the person disrupting business".
Author of the article here.

>The goal is not to make small functions for the sake of making small functions, but it's to compartmentalize some functionality into a nice, easier to reason about thing (function).

This tendency is exactly what the article highlights -- this need to compartmentalize, when taken to extremes, makes code a lot harder to read.

Not everyone does take it to extremes, but many programmers are partial to what I call "the smallest viable function" syndrome, and ergo don't stop compartmentalizing until they've abstracted away every last piece of logic. The article states that:

"Thus, a “single level of abstraction” isn’t just a single level. What I’ve seen happen is that programmers who’ve completely bought in to the idea that a function should do “one thing” tend to find it hard to resist the urge to apply the same principle recursively to every function or method they write."

>For people like me who struggle to maintain multiple layers of complex abstractions in our minds, being able to see a small function and say, "Ok, I trust this one - it does X." makes it easier to navigate up and down through the abstractions.

And that's the problem - needing to maintain what you very aptly call "multiple layers of complex abstractions". This especially hurts programmers new to the codebase (or worse, the language), since they have to juggle so many different layers of complexity. The article calls for reducing this complexity, instead of stacking more and more layers of abstractions in the name of "clean code".
It doesn't in the EU. If Amazon wants to ban you, they can ban you from buying new content or using online interaction functionality, but all existing content has to stay accessible.

In a recent court case https://openjur.de/u/879923.html this exact topic was discussed in the EU.

It turns out, Amazon can not do this. Neither can Steam, Sony or Microsoft.

The court ruled that Amazon has to unban the account of the user, and give him access to all media he ever purchased again.

If your account gets banned, you might want to take a lawyer and cite this case - OLG Köln Az 6 U 90/15.
Dude, this is a massive, for-profit corporation, not some leafy liberal arts campus. Their cultures and priorities may align to a degree, but there are some fundamental differences between them in terms of whose interests they serve, how those interests are prioritized, and the way conflicts are resolved (something Damore discovered the hard way).
> So again I say why bring up the upstream problem to begin with as it being related to their abilities for engineering?

Well, for one, if only 45% of interested applicants are women, maybe 45% female employees and managers is a reasonable goal.

> Damon makes weird ability judgements based on the population.

I remember a lot of talk about interest levels and personality types. Not much about abilities. I also think the point about multimodal distributions fairly address my concerns about possible bigotry and stereotyping. Which ability judgments concern you? And why didn't the part about multimodal distributions vs mean values assuage your concerns?
Notably unable to provide a substantive answer, just more petty insults. Let's not.
You have an, um, interesting definition of "interesting".
Why should he have to?
Email jeff@amazon.com.

I've done it a few times before when Amazon really messed up. I got a call back in less than 24 hours and my problem was solved.

[Edit: read the article again, it seems he did :) ]
I disagree with your first sentiment... His take, is just that, his take. He did his own research and came to his own conclusions. They might have been flawed, but they were his own. He very well could have changed his mind, had anyone presented more convincing evidence that would lead to a different conclusion. That didn't even appear to be an option, though, and I think that is the more threatening issue.
That's the best part! You don't need a case because all employment is at-will.

Just enough dirt, or supposed dirt, to frame a person in a negative enough light that the company considers them persona non grata.
I really hope that the bicycle makes a comeback that we can attribute to increased urbanisation. It makes so much sense as a mode of transport in and around cities.
> can address 4x more memory

x7-Z8700 8GB, i5-7Y54 16GB.

> have twice as many cores

Yeah, but each core of that i5 is significantly faster.

> and consume 2W

Intel invented a new metric, SDP, for these atoms. 2W is SDP < TDP. Cpubenchmark.net says typical TDP of x7-Z8700 is 4W.

For i5-7Y54 it’s 4.5W but can be configured to 3.5W @ 600 MHz.
Whoa, that's not cool. It stores all your private tabs on disk somewhere?
Google had a choice here. Piss off people who support intelligent discourse, or piss off the other set of people.

Personally for me I would choose to piss off the group who tends not to escalate things irrationally and let emotion drive the entire agenda until the bloody end. Not sure which group Google chose.
> Yes, there was misrepresentation.
> Google's CEO said: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”

Possible non bias causes of the gender gap in tech

...

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways.

Work your rhetorical magic on that.
If this was a trial then and I believed he was unjustly fired I'd be right there with you. But we're now in the court of public opinion and I'm not really sure it's in his best interest to speak up.
Ask HN: What is a typical cap during a pre-seed round?
What is a typical cap during a pre-seed round?
The price crashes to 0.10 cents ... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-30/the-45-mi... ... and that was only 12.5 million. and then coinbase paid people who lost money out of their own capital. lol. ponzi at its finest.
I think the inconsistency I see, is that those who wrote letters of complaint about him did so out of a political agenda. I see this argument being used unilaterally. You could just as easily say to those offended "Don't read things you are offended by. Shame on you for reading political stuff at work, keep it out of here."

[Seeing the tone of this thread I expect to lose a lot of karma for this, but it's just imaginary internet points]
I started doing comparative shopping via the local trovaprezzi.it since amazon collapsed third party seller inventories by sku and seldom buy from amazon today unless is from amazon itself (not even warehouse) and still I return a third of purchases

Shame because I previously bought dozens of books completely hassle-free
We will always be able to destroy whatever pathetic little protections are put into place. As someone who produces music and uploads it to soundcloud, and has done so for 10+ years, 128kbps is a good limit.

If they want higher quality they can ask me or hear it when I play out.

Also, IIRC, there is a 'allow high-quality streaming for logged in users' checkbox in the upload editor.
If you want to debate the Googler’s Manifesto and you’re also a good person