skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you'd have to dig deeper in the debt argument, and what it has to do with cash.

> "But the real point isn’t that Germans love cash. It’s that—for the same historical reasons—they loathe debt. (Armchair anthropologists have also long noted that German word for debt—Schulden—comes from the word for guilt, Schuld.)"

Sweden has the same culture and words for debt. "skuld", and the saying "Den som är satt i skuld är icke fri" ("He/She who is in debt is not free").

Yet Swedes likes using Credit Cards a lot. But as the author might say we have a lot higher household debt than Germany.

But Switzerland also has high household debt. And as another commenter notes Switzerland has the same cash behavior as Germany. I'd like to see some data on that though.

https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm

I do feel like an armchair anthropologist though.
I haven't had this problem with my bank just pointing out the inherent differences. With a debit card you are relying on the cyber security and data retention policy of the store, the bank, and the electronic network provider.

Now I realize that if your account is used without authorization most banks refund the money. This can take a certain amount of time and could lock up your remaining funds in the meantime.
>Slavery is based on using force to have others do your work, serve your interests -- not in enforcing certain beliefs in others. So it's not enough to have a "a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others", but also to have a society that it or individuals also don't use force to serve their private interests.

>While looks unlikely. How would such a society would enforce no slavery if people still profited from having slaves? It should punish those that do to prevent that (and thus it couldn't fully embrace the non-violence thing).

I probably didn't make the best choice of words, but by "a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others", I meant a society where violence is rejected in general; slavery is the slaver enforcing their beliefs on how the slave should behave on the slave, and they have to use violence for this, or else the slave would escape.

You're right though that maybe this would only work if every member in the society agreed not to use violence. There could be alternatives though, e.g. ostracising the violent person - if nobody else in society interacted with them, they'd starve. Or building a literal wall around the community and not letting the violent person in. Allowing people some degree of violence in direct self defence, e.g. restraining the violent person and pushing them out of the community.

>Well, if the "man watching the drowning man" was punished for his non-involvement, then future drowning men would be better off. So it might seem like it's a totally passive harm, but it actually affects the future of what's acceptable.

This only works if there's somebody who sees the person letting the drowning man drown (and if there's somebody else there, why didn't they save the drowning man themselves?). Even then there's no guarantee: maybe if such a law existed against not helping downing people, people who didn't like helping others would just stay away from rivers more, to reduce their chance of ever being in that situation in the first place.
The US healthcare system is deeply burdened with the flow of money between all parties involved in it. Money is integral to the system like the blood in our veins. Without blood pumping (money flowing), the system as it exists today dies.

How Americans obtain health insurance is largely dependent on their age/occupation (retired, coverage thru employer, etc) and income/assets. There is strong incentive to be insured to avoid a yearly tax penalty. People with low income qualify for partial or full subsidy of their insurance cost, largely footed by more fortunate tax- and insurance-paying Americans. But unless they are poor, they are still expected to pay for services rendered out of their deductible, a fixed ceiling in USD that they agreed upon with their insurer (a higher deductible tends to lower insurance cost). Having insurance also significantly reduces the "retail" cost of services and medicine (an uninsured billionaire may happily pay $250,000 cash for an ER visit, while an insured student may struggle to pay their $2,500 deductible for the same thing). One upside to Obamacare is that it has taken a lot of stress away from people, as they historically could have become destitute from massive healthcare bills that overran obscenely high deductibles (now capped under Obamacare). Pre-Obamacare, insurers had a deductible of their own sort, one which allowed them to deem an overrun so high, or a health condition so dire, that they could cut a person off (sort of like a bandwidth cap, but for human life, a lifewidth cap if you will). One (primarily financial) downside to Obamacare is that insurance costs have increased to pay into the subsidy and sky-high bill bucket (and the leftovers into for-profit insurance companies' pockets). So Obamacare, i.e. American healthcare today, is largely an effort to not only insure every American, but also protect them from financial ruin in a health crisis. And to accomplish that, the money must be flowing.

We certainly have a lot of amazing selfless people doing their best to heal the sick, but as the players in this article, people like Shkreli, and some of our congress members make so clear, follow the money trail to its darkest depths and you will find the true face of American healthcare. It's being stymied at every turn and will continue to be until it's either rescued by reform or decimated by profiteers.

This barely touches on your questions and leaves out some critical details but I hope it's of some use.
Understanding matrix factorization for recommendation
I have never seen Quartz's CMS, but it's likely adding those referral trackers to any Amazon link in any article.

Source: have worked for a few online-native magazines and seen this feature multiple times
At its heart, it is a conflict of interest and a clear violation of traditional journalistic ethics. At the very least, it is contrary to what one might assume to be a societal norm. Once one is aware of what they're doing, one feels taken advantage of and that is simply not acceptable.
I'd agree too. For example, in `Stack` implementation:

# to check if stack is empty
def isEmpty(self):
return self.stack == []

# for checking the size of stack
def size(self):
return len(self.stack)

this is weird. Why not use the `size` in `isEmpty`?
But it is ok to fire an employee if such political activity creates a hostile work environment and so on.

You could even argue that nothing in the essay was political activity, then, again, your point is moot.
I don't know, it's not the story of the century, but I found it interesting and clicked around most of the links to the Amazon brands. And only among Internet nerds are affiliate links seen as sleazy.
This should have been the response of Google, and make him apologize. Not firing him.

Why Google hasn't said publicly the same as you?
Intel Optane Review
Not necessarily.Not all algorithms are universally applicable, nor are they universally desirable on all inputs.

For example, if you have a very long (practically infinite) stream of mostly ordered items coming in and you want to semi-order a sliding window so downstream consumers have an easier time, what do you do?

You can't just call Array#sort.

Another example in the same vein: You get a large and mostly sorted dataset on an older 32 bit machine. It's about 500 million elements long, and loaded in memory on Python. Which sort algorithm do you use?
I've never heard of anything like the dividing of payments you're describing. Are you saying that the CC company doesn't pay the merchant all at once, by default? That seems really shady. They should either have enough capital to pay the merchant in-full right away, or they should pay the merchant the interest they're collecting from the buyer if they buyer isn't paying the CC bill in full each month.
I'd have a price I'd sell at - maybe a high price, but a price. "If you gave me a bag of money, I wouldn't sell" speaks to some deeper market disfunction.
>There is a huge difference between having currency in your hand or use a medium to access money held by the private organization that can go bankrupt (and this happens much more often than, for example, governments with their currencies)

From some aspects, yes. From others (no interest in purchases, directly reducing one's account balance, etc) they are the same.

>There is a huge difference between having currency in your hand or use a medium to access money held by the private organization that can go bankrupt (and this happens much more often than, for example, governments with their currencies).

Still not often enough to matter, especially since the cash one has at hand will be a limited amount anyway.

It's not like having $100 or $300 in your pocket to buy things (as opposed to using a debit card) really protects you from the "private organization that can go bankrupt", when the large majority of your money will be in some bank anyway.

Except if you propose we keep all our money in cash at all times. This has other issues, not just a government going bankrupt, but inflation, theft -- and those things are much more common than a bank going bankrupt.
> Not saying Google has to uphold everyone's 1A rights.

What rights? The guarantee that the government will not interfere with your free speech? This has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment.

> It's a lie to say Google's culture supports free speech when the cost of that speech is compliance with the tyranny of a Code of Conduct.

The memo made it clear that diversity of opinion is welcome right up to the point where it violates the CoC, but not beyond that point - if you violate the CoC - you can and will get fired. It even listed which parts of the memo would have been ok.

I've never heard of a company that places some sort of altruist dedication to free speech as a higher priority than their internal code of conduct. Google's position on this is industry standard, protects Google from lawsuits, and protects Google employees from harassment. How is that bad?
I'd add a privacy policy. I didn't want to enter my real address since I didn't know what could be done with my address. I know your intentions are not nefarious, but a simple blurb around what you do w/ collected data would be nice.
The problem is that reverse discrimination does justify the discrimination they [cl]aim to fight. If HR considers the results of my technical interviews to be biased for the benefit of people who look like me and compensate accordingly, I then have to discriminate as I'm supposed to in order to achieve overall fairness of the recruitment process. How is that supposed to reduce biases ?

Reverse discrimination is the easy way, but it is actually counterproductive in term of reducing biases. As case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law imo, of optimizing the easy metric of enrollment ratio instead of the hard goal of fairness.
> Developer cultures in the 60s and 70s were more corporate ..

Because only biiig and serious corps had the dough to play with mainframes. IBM, AT&T, Nokia, Alcatel, Ericsson are still very corporate. The world has changed a bit since then. (The Cold War changed how people view openness and sharing, the Vietnam Wwar (and recently Iraq) changed how people related to the Establishment (and the "military-industrial complex"), and big corporations. Openness became important and "cool" again.)

And CS is small even today, but it was much smaller. Only the very determined, rather serious people were doing software development. And the projects were much more "serious" back then. Waterfall development model, etc.

Diversity was better, about 36% of CS grads were women. Still long before the big Information Age explosion (.com boom, and so on).

And nowadays when you need a gadget or a website you don't need a professional big corporate project, you need just a few guys-gals.

> But generally hiring-process solutions to this problem are hopeless. You either have a diverse culture, in which case markers for age, gender, attractiveness, charm, ethnicity, extraversion, and so on, are irrelevant... or you don't.

Agreed. But if you want to ensure a transition from bad culture to good culture, you might need to start brute force hiring for it. But usually companies that lack good culture are allowed to rot because someone at the top doesn't care.

> There's still a bigger conversation to be had about inequality in general, and I'm not sure how many people in tech of any gender are interested in having it.

People much better off than the average "for some reason" find it "not their problem". Of course, some do, and try to maximize their impact (see effective altruism).
I'm somewhat sympathetic, but it's only scummy if he or she lives in an area with a housing shortage and doesn't actively push for more development. The owner is one person and it isn't necessarily their fault the locals have a NIMBY problem.

I'd certainly be in favor of adding a surtax proportional to the rent of residential properties.
I've never seen any housing advocate be opposed to new housing just because it would be unaffordable. Always there is another reason. Often in such a scenario the new housing proposal relied on displacing existing low income housing.

Affordable housing advocates would be happy to see low density mansions upzoned into relatively cheaper multi family housing but those are never the proposals we see. Instead again and again we see proposals to tear down affordable multi family apartments for working class people in order to build larger, more expensive multi family apartments for the middle class. I am unsurprised to see housing activists opposed to these sort of upzonings even if they would result in a net increase of housing.
> And only among Internet nerds are affiliate links seen as sleazy.

Given the subject matter of the article, that may be an unwarranted assumption.
I thought he just released it on his google+ and it became viral?
In some languages the "stack" may grow until all memory is exhausted.

(Some of those languages also guarantee tail call elimination.)
This is anecdotal but winters in Vermont (where I grew up) and Chicago (where I live now) are almost snow less now. I think it snowed once last year in Chicago and three or four times the year before. I haven't noticed it being aggressively hotter in the summer but It's been much warmer in the winters.
Before you ask whether that sounds reasonable, I'd need to be convinced this is an ad. To me it is an article, one that apparently someone had to thumb through a couple hundred patent applications to write, among other research.
This is great! If I could make a suggestion it would be to add the space complexity of each algorithm to the comments(the time complexity is already there.)
I don't remember that. @.
I am a black dude from an upper middle class family that went to private school his whole life and I am very, very familiar with how it's possible to have great ethnic diversity but a severe lack of diversity in other areas (and how negatively that can affect things). Because of this I've often wondered how a company or any group of people can include perspectives that many other people find to be morally reprehensible.

Let's say someone at my company holds the opinion that black people are generally too stupid to do tech jobs and they write a memo to the company explaining that opinion. They cite sources that show how blacks underperform academically compared to other ethnic groups and go about it in a really professional way. Should the company just say "well this guy made some good points maybe we should reconsider our diversity programs." Should they tell all the black employees at the company that they should be more open minded to that opinion? As a black guy at that company I would be really unhappy about that and I'd probably quit. I genuinely don't understand how that's supposed to work and would love to hear some suggestions.
Deeplearning.ai: Announcing New Deep Learning Courses on Coursera
Boston Dynamic’s ATLAS falls off stage attempting to show how much it's improved
to add to your post, that affiliate link stays active on amazon accounts that clicked it for 24hours and pays out to the owner for every product purchased in that time frame
'Arbitrarily' switch job classifications? Sorry, what is the reality grounding of classifying IT jobs as 'thing-oriented'? It seems about as scientific as the zodiac. Tell me, if you're a programmer, how much time do you spend communicating with people versus actually coding? How much time reading and writing documentation? Choosing variable and class names to communicate your code's intentions?

Can you see how classifying IT jobs as something women aren't interested in, leads to finding a 'result' that women aren't interested in IT jobs? That's literally a tautology.
Yeah, but you have to sign, which is worse.
It's very hard to see how you're critiquing the article by starting with an analysis of the author's name.
This is part of the plot by Armada by Ernest Client (which was also heavily influenced by Ender's Game)
The focus of the article is still strange though - who knocks on doors to try to convince someone to sell their home? I just took a look at Trulia at the neighborhood the man in the article was looking at - plenty of homes in the $200k - $300k range, a few even less.

Seems he is just a bargain hunter who is trying to beat the real estate market rather than participate in it. If he wants to buy a home he should pay the market price for where he wants to live or find a cheaper place to live, of which there are many within just a few miles of his desired location.
Main reason would be that for most people it would be difficult to start a family like that. If both parents and their millennial children are living together the house must be packed, no more space for new generation.
Ask HN: Why don’t companies use blind hiring to address non-talent-bias?
There's a lot of love for contactless payments in this thread. I would have thought the security-conscious HN audience would dislike them? Has something improved wrt security?
I disagree with the idea that teaching is all about teaching students to copy the teacher. Teaching is about lighting a fire, and it's obviously lit in this case. Mission accomplished.
Ken is the translator (but a writer of other things), Liu Cixin is the author.
I've learned never to be surprised at what people haven't learned yet. Especially if it's not explicitly taught. After all, everyone starts out not knowing anything, and even with good students, there are always gaps.

Calling this "inexcusable" seems ungenerous. It's inevitable.
There are some premium services that do this type of stuff for you. I like these 2 in particular as they are very comprehensive.

https://www.semrush.com/features/site-audit/

https://raventools.com/site-auditor/
I assume you've already seen Google's PageSpeed but if not: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
Microsoft to remove WoSign and StartCom certificates in Windows 10
It seems like there was this huge assumption that Boomers would be interested in downsizing, but it was totally false.

Boomers like their houses and their big gardens. They have no interest in moving to an apartment or even a townhouse. Why should they uproot themselves from their current lifestyle and disrupt their existing social networks if they can afford to stay?
California's statues are about protecting an individual from retaliation against workplace complaints. While you can argue it is related to FoS, I think it's a bit of a stretch. The statues would not, for instance, protect you if you told your co-workers your boss was murdering children in his office every day, no matter how much you believe it to be true.

Anti-SLAPP is about protecting people from the financial drain of a lawsuit by a third-party looking to intimidate. It does nothing to force anyone involved to continue to employ, or do business with, any individual.

The problem in this case, from an employer's perspective, is that they have one employee who is creating a toxic atmosphere not from a protected position, but from a hostile one.

And while you might believe that people who read his memo as "toxic" are over-reacting to it (and there is an argument there, though one I wouldn't agree with), they must be free to "overreact" and speak their mind.

It does get very, very tricky, since while unpopular racist/sexist opinions may necessarily create problematic dynamics in the work place, that could easily also be true of opinions those who decry this memo would think should be protected. If I work at a company with a steeped culture of faith, and I walk around talking about how Christian's are stupid, to what extent should the employer be forced to continue to employ me?

I tend to believe that, to the extent we have freedom of speech, we chose when and how to exercise that in public. Our choices have consequences, and it is on us to accept those.

I'm a small business owner. If tomorrow, I write a "memo" which says something as moronic as "Women don't make good clients", and I HAVE women as clients, I can't expect them to continue to want to do business with me. I can't demand any type of legal protection which would force them to continue to do business with me.

It is just as true that, at least with my company, I can see many types of clients who would not appreciate the libertine culture of my agency. I've had more than one potential client, who found out we used to take our employees to a regional Burning Man event, show extreme discomfort at it, and it likely cost me the account.

I've had job applicants turn down working here because they were more conservative (and one I remember who thought we were too conservative for them).

That's just the nature of the thing. People are free to say what they want, to associate with who they want, and must accept the social consequences for doing so.
Google has enough money to survive everything for decades.

It may not be the case for smaller companies that love to copy what they do.
And part of the dysfunction of the DC metro is the lack of dedicated funding.

Accountability and power need to stay in the same hands. Being held accountable for a task you are powerless to affect is a powerful recipe for dysfunction. In context, funding is power - the power to make decisions about who gets how much funding and resources to improve the system. If you have funding, but no accountability, then you will simply redirect that funding to projects which are are actually accountable for.

Electing an MTA head, without giving that head dedicated funding, will be a political nightmare.
The Strang book: "Introduction to Linear Algebra" does seem to have quite a few "high quality" 1-star reviews. They mostly seem to cluster around this book not being good for a linear algebra introduction, for someone new to the field. Typical comments:

"It seems the reviewers who think this book is wonderful for non-math majors are math majors!"

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Linear-Algebra-Gilbert-S...

...I of course expect that any popular book will have 1 star reviews, especially by people who had a hard time with the material. Anyone have thoughts whether the Strang book is better as a supplement to other texts in coming up to speed on Linear Algebra? Other book recommendations?
> Adam Savage is a compulsive knoller

And is friends with another famous knoller - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxLxwbm7FMA , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ