skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about we talk about Trump's actual policies. Let's take healthcare specifically.

If Trump and the republican congress's healthcare policy were put into effect, millions of people would lose their health insurance. I know how shitty it can be to go about health insurance with a chronic illness. I expect thousands of people to die if this policy were put into place.

What the fuck does it mean to disagree with me about policy but agree with me in principle, in this case? Am I supposed to ignore the fact that political decisions impact the material lives of actual human beings? Am I supposed to play polite with politics that will harm people I care about because it's more important to agree in principle than to agree on actual concrete policy?

People who complain about how close-minded it is to be vehemently against Trump and by corollary people who put Trump into power never mention actual policies and how those policy differences actually impact people. It is always vague statements about politics in the abstract.

Politics in the abstract is never the reason for anything.
its entirely game theory because the only way to secure these distributed systems is if the participants all benefit most by enforcing the code and not deviating
Epilepsy and bipolar disorder share genetic cause
The problem is Google fired this guy for distributing WRONG information. Wrong is the important word here.

If the information is right, it completely changes the case, and the guy was fired for Wrong reasons.

I hope he'll sue and win his job back (yes, I think Google needs this guy more than ever).
I think I have tried something similar. I will try this one too. Thanks a lot!
Did you even read the memo? He explicitly asked to end the programs Google has set up to encourage more women and minority students to study Computer Science because they weren't a good use of resources.

There is no lower bar or quota. All of the diversity programs he mentioned are to encourage more applications.
good old mysql. it is the cockroach of software.
>why are you then commenting on a story whose main source (the document) you haven't read?

Because they're outraged by what they've heard about it and demand that someone (almost without question) facilitate that outrage, correct or not.
So true. You have to think of every little action a potential malicious attacker could use and find a way to counter it. It's like a chess game, but with much higher stakes.
When I read 10.000%, I though he was being reasonably realistic about the magnitude of his increase in productivity (a 10% increase is great, nothing to scoff at), but wildly exaggerating about the precision by which he measured his productivity, to three significant figures!

But if you're German, isn't that the kind of hyperbole you most appreciate, since you love making precise measurements, no matter their magnitude? ;)
I feel that this story needs a date to make any sense. 2015? Wow that's completely ridiculous and infuriating. 1984? Yeah that makes sense, handwriting was a critical skill for effective communication in the college setting.
Uber spent $680 million on the Otto. GM spent $1000 million on Cruise Automation. Neither of these came with tooling and supply chains or production engineering. In the automotive industry, a billion gets some talent and potentially promising intellectual property, not vehicles on the road.

Yes, I think the Otto purchase was a bigger waste of money than the subprime leases. On the other hand, it didn't wreck lives by treating people disposabley.
It seems like they just want EVERYONE to go to college, even if they go $100k into debt to study German Polka History. They should give fewer student loans, or make them bankruptable, and make sure students actually will be financially benefited within 10 years. There is a surplus of students, which technically means they can give inferior education. If there were a shortage of students, universities would need to up their game.
Please present your case if you are so sure. I want hard facts, not just famous people repeating the assertion.
I understand the air of superiority in your comment. You can keep that to yourself and go back to your colonial days. By the way, what you think about this ? Isnt it stupid to call it a world series ? As a European, will you call it the world series ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series
The top 25% would be broke if the bottom 75% couldn't afford their products and services
Why did the memo's author think that Google's current hiring practices were flawed? I mean, what empirical evidence? Were there teams full of "diversity" hires that were performing below par?
Let me know if you ever get any $500 hotel vouchers that you have no use for. I'll happily give you $0 for them.
Show HN: ABCs of Programming, a children’s picture book
As a programmer I wanted a way to explain to my toddler what I do at work. Currently I tell him I give hugs to robots and write email. So my wife and I wrote a picture book about programming concepts called "The ABCs of Programming"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548489778
I think the software community has generally done a poor job with authN, authZ, and credential management. The Web Authentication working group is working on a new spec to tackle some of their problems issues [0], but it's still fairly young and it fails to address some common pain-points.

It seems reasonable to distinguish between identity and device. If I lose some device, I can publish its revocation.

Serious internet users will have dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts. How do we handle revocations and key rotation?
>Not firing this person would have been a Title VII violation

I disagree. His manifesto is pretty clearly core political speech protected by the First Amendment, so Title VII would be unconstitutional as applied if it operates to force Google to suppress such speech. Unfortunately there is no precedent clearly establishing this, so the mere threat of lawsuits (and accompanying legal expenses) may have been a factor in Google deciding to fire him.
I wonder how many Apple employees will be fired for speaking their minds (or writing 10 page documents) about how much they hate open office designs...
The actual mistake that you yourself realized that you made is, imho, a good example of what is happening in this drama.

James gets accused of something that he really didnt write and people refer to things that are grossly misinterpreted or just plain wrong and clearly not in the actual document (in more general terms the characterizations could be described as lies or misrepresentations of the truth as per my original comment). Just as your attempt to explain why ge got attacked.

A clear difference between your comment and many in this drama is that you retracted your statement and the VP of Google didnt (afaik) and that is good on you! But I never talked about you as an individual in the first place so thats kind of irrelevant to my point. You can call it "unfair" of me to single out your first comment and not your retraction, but again my point wasnt to judge you as an individual. It was to show how that specific comment (partly out of context) was a good example of what is going on.
>the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

There is research finding that the more advanced a country is in terms of gender equality (by generally accepted metrics), the more pronounced the occupational gender gap actually is in most fields.

One proposed explanation is that women in advanced economies are freer of constraints and higher up in the Maslow pyramid of needs, and can afford to go into jobs they actually like, rather that whatever they feel is their duty/more lucrative/otherwise rewarding. Kind of like yuppies (of either gender) dream of exiting the corporate world to set up an organic food shop. That would certainly explain the very different STEM gender gaps in the US/Sweden vs India/China, for example.

I don't have the reference handy, but if someone can provide it, please do !
Stop Thinking About Yourself If You Want to Build Great Products
Of all terms that have been formed on the internet, "mansplaining" is the one I hate the most. All a discussion is, at the end of the day, is two people explaining their own viewpoints. But now, with this word, you have a get-out-of-conversation-free card because if you don't like someone's response, just say it's mansplaining. It's almost unbelievably ignorant.
It's subtle, but yes. These 2 lines essentially state that as women are more interested in people, there are some roles they might not be able to perform. A little further down he makes a similar claim that since women look more towards work life balance, technical and leadership roles may not seek out leadership roles as much as men. This can be used again to claim women don't belong in those roles. This is also bullshit, as I know several women who run a company and have a decent life.

Strip away his science and his words, he's a misogynistic techbro (I'm reminded of ESR) who wants to pretend technology is some sort of meritocracy and that a woman doesn't play well in that situation. Almost every one of his claims has a hanging but attached to it.
> So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

In competitive environments men are more willing to fight than women, so they are more likely to get the jobs because women are more likely to give up. And I think we should try to change this because as you said "people skills" have a lot of value in management. We need both skills and try to represent both in management roles.

> WEIRD how none of these guys ever argue that because our ladybrains are better at communication and teamwork we should be paid more

There are profession typical for women like nursing that they have less salary than tech jobs. The reason is economical, tech companies produce more money. But I strongly thing the nursing job is as important as a tech job and we should try to remove the gap between professions. But with a capitalism system you cannot do this easily.

Note: I am one of the persons who agree with the biology differences between male and female.
Is there something in particular that you do not like about Promises?
I will never forget being verbally abused for the first time on xmas day 1996 Doom Deathmatch. Funny stuff, about 2 minutes of insults and death threats.

The sad thing is nowadays this is bullying, sexist, racist, trolling and so on. It just made me laugh. I think the trash talk was always in this community.
Meant the part of North Jersey that is affluent, not that all of North Jersey is affluent.
>I don't know if the engineer wrote something awful or not

Perhaps you should read it then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14969705

>this article is just a justification for the difference as if nothing can be done. And that is not true.

No, the memo did actually give suggestions for getting more women into programming (e.g. pair programming).
At single-digit thousands per year, I don't know if I'd describe that as "many."
Most people don't agree with the contents of the memo, or it's conclusion. But HN is filled with a specific breed of pseudo-intellectual that I will happily poke fun at whenever possible.
So does that mean that people who play games that have maps and that keep the maps in their heads develop grey matter, but people who just blindly run around the map and don't learn where things are will lose grey matter?

What games DON'T require spatial memory? I'm having a hard time thinking of one.
Instead of claiming that your opinion is a "literal undeniable truth" and telling people to "do your research" perhaps you could make an actual argument with evidence.
UK is certainly in Europe.
That's the theory, it's just that a lot of people frankly have their heads too far up their asses to see how a global optimization is better than the local one.

I don't care to be this coarse, but I've been trying for 10 minutes to find a better way of putting it.
The point is, many people feel very bad at the thought that the distribution you mention exists. Some feel it's not something inherent and can be changed.
Absolutely agree. My profession is more creative and most of my eurekas happen when I'm doing mundane house chores. Something about the mind wandering about I suppose. I don't think it's a coincidence either that some of our best ideas often come just before we fall asleep.
> If you sign a contract with your employee saying you won't do no-poaching then doing so would be a breach of contract obviously but that would be a specific use-case.

You contract is "employment law" + "your contract". I they don't agree with employment law they have to override it in your contract, in this case with a non-compete clause. If they don't, you have both agreed to the terms in "employment law" + "your contract".
You talk about Republicans essentially being more inclusive and then trot out "RINOs" as an example. RINO is a disparaging term used specifically to exclude and shame certain Republicans. In what way do you imagine that this demonstrates that Republicans support diversity of thought?
CSU is literally middle tier in the scheme of public post-secondary education in California, being sandwiched between the junior colleges on the lower end and the University of California on the higher end. While certain campuses like Cal Poly punch above their weight, the system as a whole is not selective.
There's a criticism section specifically answering the point you're trying to make, mate. Am I supposed to accept Horseshoe Theory because it has a wikipedia page? All that means is that people hold the view that extreme ideologies are the same. I already acknowledged that people hold that view.

> The far right will censor to ensure that nobody questions the regime. But the far left will censor to ensure nobody questions the idea of the day. Which is functionally equivalent to a social regime.

Ok, I see. Your politics boil down to what you can say or cannot say in public without being publicly criticized.
As it has been made obvious I other parts of this thread, people even disagree on what sexism or racism is. Some argue that falsehood is required, for example.

I use the definition that includes prejudice, stereotyping or discriminating based on gender, and irrespective of whether something is factual (I.e I do not subscribe to the idea that facts can't be sexist/racist).

I apologize for reading the "unfit" between the lines - what jumped out at me as stereotypical was remarks such as women being more neurotical and having lower stress thresholds.

I'm not going to argue the truth of it, and I won't argue whether that's sexist (for the reasons outlined above) - but it's definitely stereotyping women - fact or not.
Welcome to Tech: Where everyone is sexist and there are no safe spaces
I think you could do some secure voting software if all your citizens had a secure two factor signature and you used block chain.

I'm not sure why you would do it in a non-corrupt country though.
Thought Police
> The assumption here is that employment in STEM industries fundamentally and solely involves "mechanically interesting things".

It's not. Read the original memo.

He especially mentioned that women gravitate to the more social jobs in STEM environments, but Google's diversity programs were trying to force them into the "code monkey" jobs instead, to spread them more evenly.

> Strong technology is important for success, but so is leadership, market fit, team dynamics, understanding the customer, etc. The hardest question in tech companies is not "how" to build, but "what" to build. This is essentially a people-oriented problem, since customers are people.

Absolutely. So why waste your people-oriented employees on jobs that aren't people-oriented?
Incorrect headline. It's not the government but a court, and it's only in one state out of 25+.
> In 25 years they'll still have 25-30 years of work left in their lives

If you don't care about having a wife or kids you can easily retire forever after 10-15 years of work in SV or NYC.
That misses an important point IMO. The idea of Freedom of Speech is what's important, and that idea is not "the literal first amendment and absolutely nothing else". Arranging for harm to come to someone for expressing points of views you don't like is antithetical to the idea of Freedom of Speech. What we're supposed to be protecting is everyone expressing any views they hold, and for bad or wrong views to be dealt with in the marketplace of ideas, not by silencing the owners of those views.

You can perhaps say there are exceptions to views to be tolerated, but we're letting those exceptions become bigger and bigger. It's a dangerous trend, and if it continues, the idea of Freedom of Speech could be gone, even if the Government doesn't explicitly suppress it.
Yeah. What I like about remote work:

- I can focus

- I can go on a walk w/ my dog, wife, kid(s) whenever I want

- I can sit and think without worrying that I don't look busy to some stupid manager...

Lots of reasons, and they're all perfectly acceptable. Good leaders will realize that the best work often happens when you're not directly working (e.g. in the shower, doing laundry, going for a walk). Being able to step aside and do these things throughout a workday is a productivity boost.
There is money in tech so women have an interest in playing victim to gain advantages. There are also a few males who hope to gain status for themselves and securing their own position by taking the women's side (while keeping other men down).

Men who play (or are) victims on the other hand are generally ridiculed or ignored, so there is no advantage in doing so.

Behind ideas there is usually self interest.
> the voting machine is running the exact same source code?

Or the processor is trustworthy ? Many voting machines are using old processors, such as 68000, and it would not be too hard to emulate a a rogue processor that will have a different behavior, whatever the source code is.

You can also change the behavior of the voting machine at a certain time, or in certain conditions (such as detecting a voting session has started)

The problem is not that voting machines are vulnerable to one or two attacks. There are thousands of ways of compromising them.

The only answer to this is that cryptography specialists do not have any answer to a secure electronic voting not involving a physical element (a bulletin, a receipt, etc.). This means that there is no THEORETICAL solution.
> backed by links

Oops, sorry I guess my comment was worded a bit confusingly there. When I said "backed by links to scientific studies" I was referring to the original memo. The Gizmodo article which originally leaked the memo omitted those links, but they're present in the original document: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

> PhD in sexual neuroscience

> female

These qualities are helpful for getting other people to take the article seriously instead of just immediately dismissing it as an "anti-diversity screed", but they don't in and of themselves affect the factual accuracy of the statements being made. As I said, this author is mostly just re-affirming the same points that were made in the original memo; those underlying points are equally valid regardless of who's making them.
Would also considering firing somebody for their lack in critical thinking skills if said persons believes in, let's say, an all powerful being, and who guides part of his life based on sacred texts which are not subject to criticism?
Probably Kotlin :')
Ah the tech cycle of short-sightedness going from an advantage to a disadvantage.
I think what they're describing isn't related to video games. It's just that using your brain a certain way makes it better at that type of task. The idea that playing Mario 64 improves the spatial reasoning isn't surprising because most levels are large and open and require spatial reasoning whereas first person shooters often featured tight, indoor corridors where the player cannot observe landmarks easily from different locations and must therefore hardcore directions into their memory.
Wow. Other than Metallica, I don't own an album by any of these people, and other than Metallica and Michael Jackson, I don't think I'd be able to name a single song by the few others that I do recognize the name.

Oh, and I'm using the word "album". That probably explains it all ... :-)
Washing Machine Fire Pit
Why do something simple, when we can do something complicated instead?
This is correct. There is a lot being made about Google trying to enforce ideological purity, and not enough being made about why Google feels obligated to have this company culture in the first place.

I speculate (without much evidence) that Google's intention is to manage PR and deflect attention away from their actual lack of diversity. http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016
I think this is an ad for a product, so I'm not going to read it unless someone can convince me otherwise.
The pension system in the US has gone down the ratholes. About the only people now entering the workforce that can get them any more are government (mainly municipal) employees and railroad workers.

The larger employers have moved from employer-managed defined-benefit pension plans to employee-managed defined-contribution pension plans, usually named for the section of tax code that describes the characteristics of the plan.

With defined-contribution plans, while you are working, your employer has the option of paying some money into your retirement account, which has various discouragements against early withdrawals. When you stop working, they stop paying. But you still control the account. With pension plans, the company sets money aside for future pension obligations, and may occasionally get audited by a regulator to ensure that the money is still there and adequate to pay out future benefits under certain assumptions that might not necessarily be true.

But the promised benefits of each pension plan are different, selected by the company (or muni-corp) that offered them. There was always a perpetuity (until death), and there might have also been benefits for surviving widow(er)s and minor children. Various health care benefits might have been attached, but probably not, as most retirees would probably go to Medicare.

The employee-managed accounts are seen as preferable to the older pension system, because some companies chose to use the employee pension fund to leverage their other investments or embezzle outright, and thus reneged upon their promises to retirees, who were forced to fall back on government-run pension insurance and Social Security.

Even now, the pension funds for municipal employees are at risk in towns that overpromised benefits to attract their employees, and are now going bankrupt because of it. What do you do if you are forced to either take a permanent haircut on your pension payments, or live somewhere that cannot afford to hire a firefighter? In short, I think it very likely that every remaining pension plan in the US is based on accounting that simply does not compute. At some point in your career, you discover that someone was lying to you and cheating you, and by then it's usually too late.

With the 401(k) plans, at least you know you're getting screwed out of your retirement as you're still working.
Boeing Copies Flying Geese to Save Fuel
See my explanation, it's subtle, he doesn't outright say to discriminate, but he does imply it.
Nope, cruise car was in the other lane turning left. It turned into my lane just after I passed the car turning left and the cruise car made a sudden stop in the wrong (my) lane. Had it continued, it would've collided with my rear wheel - so I'm like 75% sure I wouldn't have been at fault.