skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> bad epistemic practices

The idea that some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior to others is one of these "banned" "facts" that has been excluded from civilised discussion for a reason, and that lies in the history of so-called "scientific racism" that was used to justify genocides in the 20th century.

The idea that "some groups of humans have a statistical average of some attribute that is higher than some other attribute" is an idea that people are basically incapable of not turning into "all X are inferior to Y". The idea that women are statistically less likely to be programmers gets used as justification for itself.

Let alone trying to distinguish between "wrong" (morally) and "wrong" (factually incorrect with relation to the observable universe).

Also, at no point did I mention suppressing the discussion. But you've simply turned your own argument around: you're arguing that saying "this discussion is harmful" is itself a harmful discussion!

And indeed we're also back to the question of whether being fired by your employer actually is a free speech question or not. There's no suggestion of government involvement in this speech, is there? Are you going to say "employees should be protected by the state from fear of being fired for any statements they make in the workplace, no matter how offensive their co-workers find them"?
How a New York Times Reporter Became a Cheerleader for the Atomic Bomb
His (and all Googlers) opinion was solicited. His mistake was accepting that solicitation and having a politically unacceptable position.
The answer is apparently to get the credit card companies to pay you for ads.
Came here to say that.

Transparent voting boxes, ballots in envelopes, manual redundant counting done by people, usually voter who were nicely asked if they can come help back in the evening. That's what we use in France, you get the official result a few hours after the closing of the voting stations.

The whole process is watchable, from the sealing of the box the morning to the count in the end and parties send observers in random stations to check nothing fishy happens.
An official log book is open for anyone to notice if they feel something fishy happened (you were not allowed to vote, the counting was unfair, etc...)

Oh, and make voting day a holiday, or just put it on Sundays.

I used to wonder how US could not even get that last part right, but then I understood that a whole party thinks it is in its interest to have less voters.
Glad it works for you!

Kind of answered in another subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14963524
Totally agree. Submitted for the humour factor.
> When the only speech that is relevant has been reduced to that which is published or broadcast with mass media; and when nearly all such venues are policed by supporters of the left, in a private context

The rise of the right and the general rightward shift over the past several decades has been largely driven by the right policing and pressuring the mass media (the Democratic Party shifting it's center of power from center-left to center-right in the 1990s helped); to the extent there is even a remotely defensible appearance that the right is not favored by the mass media it's because in theblast couple years the Republican Party has shot rightward faster than the media and public discourse has, outpacing the movement of the Overton Window.
And I immediately regret getting back on social media after this. I was honestly hoping I wouldn't see this sort of thing on HN, as I have on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
Podcast patent ruled invalid by court
It's an indication that there is not a lot of trust in the mainstream media's ability or willingness to fairly hear and represent positions outside the mainstream. I believe Damore is quoted to that effect in the article under discussion.
The context of his memo is an internal gender studies mailing list, which is supposed to serve exactly these kinds of discussions. It's not like he sent this document to unsuspecting employees.
Yeah, Google staff are trying really hard...
plus, I might add, you can create secure software, that can't be penetrated from outside, but what about the hardware? Unless you write this (software) too, how can you trust the underlying hardware? e.g.: broadpwn.
Yes, open source makes it easier to audit/collaborate/patch but it's not enough.
The Daily Mail coverage is worse...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4771194/The-m...

I now predict an uptick in people using 'correctbatteryhorsestaple' as their password...
Part of his case may be the details of who he sent this manifesto to. If it went 'viral' inside of Google, is that his fault?
This is on steps to provide Universal Basic Income on the long run. That which requires ID & bank account for every person to deposit cash.
Geneva has made its e-voting software public: https://republique-et-canton-de-geneve.github.io/chvote-1-0/...

I'd much prefer electronic to paper. Last year I voted on 24 initiatives, and that is just the federal level. It also does not include elections.
using certificates is getting advanced. Here you'll allow the server to request a client certificate from the visitor. The visitor will have to supply the certificate (which is 4096b if you take security serious).

Easy (read easier) to do with nginx: https://www.google.de/search?q=nginx+client+side+certificate...

It requires quite a bit of steps, but is as secure as it gets what web access is concerned.

You should not be surprised to see 15k+ failed login attempts on ssh with popular ISP's. As I said, a system is the most vulnerable when it has just been installed and a/the default root password has not yet been changed.
Simply disallow password login on ssh, change the port and only allow non-root users you need to allow.
I have on my systems only 1 user allowed to login, authenticated by a 4096b key. There is no way an attacker can use ssh if not using an ssh exploit. The system is updated automatically every hour. This way known exploits are very quickly taken care of.

For me, server security has been a practice over many years and it takes many years to perfect your 'secure server setup'. It's depressing how many companies do not adhere good security practices and just leave their systems unprotected.
Especially mail servers.
The engineer is likely to lose because of the demonstrable harm to Google's brand in combination with his at-will employment contract.

However, that may not matter if the guy doesn't care about winning the case. By pushing himself back into the spotlight he asserts himself as an alt-right hero fighting against the "politically correct" culture. By martyring himself in this way he stands to gain a lot, even if his complaint has no merit.
That's implementation problem, not an argument against making sure only eligible citizens can vote.

Why not have a national ID like in some European countries? Issue it at age of 15, you can go to a government office with parents when you are 15 and get your ID.

You can pass a sensible legislation for this. Have a grace period of 2 election cycles to allow all the people who want to vote enough time to get their ID (10 years is more than enough time to prove your address).
>Wasn't that his plan from the start?

No, his "plan" was to have a discussion.

>He probably played it well

So, not only assuming ulterior motives, but taking them for certain too...
That's what the mapping operators are for: `.mapResult` (same as `promise.then`), `.mapError` (same as `promise.catch`), or `.map`. The latter has an errback signature, like Node.js callbacks. They can also return new futures, transforming the result asynchronously. On top of that, error handling in promises/futures is much easier than in callbacks, as you can use one error handler for a chain of operations. Kinda like exceptions in synchronous code.
How and why did he plan such a thing?
How can he not understand the amount of damage he has caused not just inside of Google, but also within the tech community as a whole? He should have been fired the moment he pressed the share button on the document.
I'm really surprised at this guys surprise at being fired.

No matter whether you think he's a monster or a martyr, posting anything that even suggests a different capability of your female colleagues at your place of work is begging to be fired. I'd have a lot more sympathy if he was sharing his thoughts at a bar and was overheard, or if he posted this on his own non-work blog, but seriously, shouldn't the outcome have been pretty obvious to him?

edit: grammar
Fwiw, microbenchmarks are not a good indicator of application perf in general. That said, nodejs is pretty fast. Also a memory hog, and doesn't support parallelization.
Dhaka Regency Hotel
Studies have shown that women pay a penalty for negotiating salary, while men don't.
Check out part of his conclusion here: https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/894768062682980353
People have a reason to make that distinction. You are not bound to see humanitarian aid for expats anytime soon.

Also, i dont think it's a term reserved for westerners. What do you call a rich saudi who currently lives in miami, an immigrant?
Hugo v0.26 Released – AP and Chicago Language Style Support
When I first heard about this program my first thought was "Hahahahaha did nobody at Uber talk to dealership sales department?"

Now my thought is "Hahahaha. I was right."

Uber basically made a subsidiary that specialized in loans that everyone expects to end with the car repo'd and at auction. It's no surprise they got burnt.
Quite recently, Google was found guilty of colluding to depress engineer salaries via "no poaching" agreements. Google doesn't get the "free market" benefit of the doubt anymore in these matters.
It has an excellent runner and makes much better use of Python features:

* you can define tests as free functions (you don't have to, it also supports classes and even regular unittest cases, you can use pytest to run your existing suite)

* exceptions aside it uses the standard `assert` statement

* fixtures are DI'd, independent from tests and much more flexible than the setUp/tearDown dance

* tests are configured and fixtures are defined using decorators & generators

* excellent support for data-driven tests (parametrized tests and fixtures)

* there is a wealth of reusable third-party plugins[0] ranging from framework helpers[1] to test parallelisation and distribution[2]

[0] http://plugincompat.herokuapp.com

[1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytest-tornado

[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytest-xdist
I don't really get this article. It doesn't really say anything new and continually throws out statements designed to get the dear reader on the opposite side. "Trump supporter Peter Thiel", complaining about how only Palantir can maintain their systems, tossing around how many millions of license plates it can store, complaining about how it doesn't operate well with other systems...this reads like a hit piece.

Yeah, Palantir's ecosystem is a closed ecosystem. But that's kind of becoming de rigeur these days for market leaders. Yeah, it sucks and ideally wouldn't exist, but don't paint it as some novel way for capitalists to fuck you over. That disingenuous approach does more harm than good imo.

I'm most definitely not a fan of Palantir ever since digging into them and bailing out of the hiring process ~five years ago bc it made me squeamish, but this article just doesn't really seem to say anything new or even show an even-handed introduction to the company.
I've been a bit of a Google fan for a long time, but I'm also afraid of leftist authoritarianism, and their handling of the memo had galvanized me against them. I'm not one for boycotts or overreactions, but the "silencing cultural dissenters" business is simply the antithesis of liberal values, and it's especially wrong coming from a company that purports to be a bastion of freedom and defender of rights. So on the one hand, hang 'em high, but on the other hand, not for failing to sufficiently toe the party line.
Catch the bug, walking through the stack (2016)
I dont think its banned i can browse it
https://archive.org/search.php?query=india
Infographic: The Evolution of the App Stores
I think some of the comments here are ignoring that with their own distribution platform comes their own distinct user experience. As part of Netflix, Disney could never experiment with content - they are restrained to the UX designed to suit the lowest common denominator between movies/tv etc. Disney invests highly in R&D all over the place - imagine if they did that here with a streaming platform AND the children of the world's favourite content.

Weather they do decide to innovate on the classical stream-a-movie-file-to-users type system remains to be seen... But they certainly have a unique opportunity here.
>But I already paid.

The sellers set what is being sold too.

They can set it to be e.g. "I sell the ability to see just 1 minute of my 10 hour movie, only in black and white, with mono sound for $1000, only once" if they so wish.

>I'd consider a digital movie file to be one 'product', independent to whatever medium I choose to play it on; But the movie industry might advocate for a separate 'product' per medium.

So, isn't that to their discretion?

The question is rather: why are buyers so desperate for those things in the first place.

They could have boycotted the whole thing.

But buy buying and/or pirating them despite such terms (e.g. only in DVD), they show there's value to what the sellers are trying to sell.

(Note: not entirely my personal preferences on the subject, playing the devil's advocate)
How can we know for sure?

Besides that, is suing google a sure thing? I bet they have the best lawyers.
The long passphrase idea as suggested by xkcd is fine, provided you pick random words. For instance, a database of 2048 words, and a 4 word passphrase has 44 entropy (2^44 possible passwords).

>>> log2(2048 ** 4)
44.0

Even if somebody knows the pattern they have 17 592 186 044 416 passwords to try. You can further increase number of passwords to try by increasing number of words. Probably with advances of technology 4 words may be somewhat unsecure in the future, but 5 words is 2048 times harder to crack than 4 words password, so it should be still secure.

The article in question shows three word passwords being cracked, but please note that three words is 2048 times easier to crack than 4 words, and probably very feasible to crack using graphics cards (provided poor choice of algorithms like MD5).
Ah, so we're going to argue that trying to organise discrimination against female co-workers is exactly the same as trying to organise a labour union?
React was released in 2013. Redux was released in 2015. If you'd picked them then you've had a very long amount of time using the same tools.
that's true, people will always have their own feelings towards subjects and we humans don't have the ability to cleanly separate our rationality from our emotions. However, denying an objective truth just because we find it hard to get to is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We have tools available to us to get to the truth (science, logic, reason, open debate, etc), and to discard these tools leaves us with nothing but subjectivity and tribalism.
Beautiful but geez, Wired's headline typography is simply unreadable. It's such a pain to read.
No, I am not suggesting that. Some, not few, women speak up and take action. What's then the difference between women who do and those who don't? Especially if they have the same background. What about the women that, in the same conditions, have no reason to speak up? Or women are victims and need men's help by default?
AKA "Two git users, three opinions".
Reminds me of Niven's philosophical cowards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers
Paper ballots leave a lot of room for doubt in my mind. How you can you recount the ballots and come up with a different number? This shouldn't be possible, but it happens all the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_recount

Thinking out loud here, how about a blockchain based solution? Each user gets a new address, and that address is printed on a receipt after you vote. This way you can verify your vote at anytime, and the votes can be counted in public.
It was more insensitive than it was inaccurate and also predicted what would happen to the author.
And it's also been proven time and time again that the "gender pay gap" is a lie. A myth propagated by people who don't know how to read statistics and raw data, instead curating it to be something it isn't.
What about it? It's not mentioned by the original memo in that footnote about Marxism.
I've had such requests too. We had a system that returned query results in a few ms, and people rated it as untrustworthy, not valuable, etc etc.

We added a fancy "computing... thinking... validating..." interstitial, and suddenly everyone loved it.

It was literally just an animated gif with a meta refresh redirect.
Would anyone be kind enough to chime in with their professional two cents as to which side may have the upper hand in terms of the law?

To me, while I believe Google acted wrong by firing him and proved the validity of the arguments the author (of the memo) laid out, it seems that Google has every right to fire him if the terms of employment they laid out for him, which probably includes a reference to their internal guide about espousing ideologies, were broken by submitting that memo, but I'd love to hear from a more knowledgeable person.
Yeah, a lot of us are sick of HN turning into Ideological Diversity Memo News.
Well, I don't know of anyone actually so named, so there's that. I also don't always accept an interlocutor's priors when they seem unlikely to support productive discussion, and argument from absurdity is one of those situations.

You seem strongly convinced that there is nothing more to be said beyond your own apparently firmly held view on this subject, and I respect that. However, it appears this view is far from ubiquitous. Does misrepresenting and insulting those who do not share it seem more likely to convince them than ignoring them does?
Native mobile app development is the exception here if you can weed out the "we need an iOS developer with a strong understanding of Angular.js and HTML5" jobs or the React Native jobs that some consulting company talked a hiring manager into thinking they need.
I'm sorry but a `reducer` isn't a 90s-era Java concept at all [0], and you don't actually need to use any of those other things. This is beyond ridiculous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_(higher-order_function)
Now obviously, what he did was injudicious. If you are a white male and suspect a diversity program is going to fail (and there's a lot of evidence that many of them do fail, sometimes even with negative impacts on the people they are meant to help) then you would be wise to shut up. The same would be true if a religious owner asked employees what they thought of their religion. It's best to just avoid disagreeing without showing too much interest.
He emphasized in the article that he was talking about patterns, not individuals. So there's no way you could draw the conclusion that he meant to suggest that his female colleagues were any less capable than their male counterparts.
Monsanto Was Its Own Ghostwriter for Some Safety Reviews
You mean we're stuck with the legacy stuff forever.
Stop worrying about PKI
Everybody that has/had to handle PKI knows the pain it is to manage and maintain such complexity.
We have developed a tooling that abstracts all complexity while guaranteeing the security, letting you focus on building awesome products.
This API allows you to validate certificates during strong authentication or signing processes, by providing endpoints to generate challenges, validate data signature and PKI certificate chains.
You can check out the European Trusted List Validation API using the Mashape and Rapid API marketplace online.

https://market.mashape.com/Trust1Team/eu-lotl-certificate-validation
Sure. It's technically correct, but that doesn't make it right.

If I (or Gizmodo) were to write and spread fake news about you, where it is claimed that you are most likely a paedophile...

Would you appreciate news agencies afterwards further spreading the lie by using technically correct statements like "dragonwriter, which is largely considered a paedophile"? Especially considering that basic fact checking could verify that this is indeed not true?
Location: Philadelphia, PA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Unity, Unreal, C#, JavaScript, NodeJS, ReactJS, AWS, Java (Android), Game Design, Game Development

CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ckochhar/ - My profile has my CV available for download

Portfolio: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTfbQ2s8Vxu_iJoq2NwFE...

E-mail: chaitanya.kochhar@gmail.com
"I has honestly expected The Guardian to hold higher standards."

... what? It's the Guardian. It's a left-wing version of Breitbart. The vast majority of their 'reporting' is ideology-based fact spinning. I keep wondering why people somehow say that it's a 'respectable newspaper'.
Just because something is predictable doesn't mean it's OK though.
Wouldn't it be only 15 years? (Since switching to a new currency)
Why are media outlets calling it an "anti-diversity" memo?
> With so many links in the chain, it's my opinion that it's unreasonable to expect them all to be processed by people. It won't scale and I'm not convinced that it's that much safer anyway.

I think the main argument for physical voting is that it's much safer precisely because it doesn't scale well - and so attacks against it don't scale well either. The manpower requirements buy you security.

> As painful as it is, I think we all need to trust the state, to some degree, to do the jobs that are the responsibility of the state.

I agree, but I think it does not apply to elections - simply because it's the one place where both the ruling party and competing groups have very strong incentives to mess with the process.

> Once the votes have been tallied for a district, isn't it possible to tamper with them as they are transmitted up the chain to the next link in the processing?

Yes, but again, the argument goes, the less scalable and more manpower-intensive the whole process is, the more difficult is to hack it.

> I think that is possible, the best we can hope for is to push for as much transparency as possible and hope that, if it comes to it, we have enough data to detect such tampering.

I agree with the call for transparency, but I also agree with the people who point out that inserting electronic systems destroys that transparency (too easy to hack, too complex for general population to inspect).
Given that's not what the memo suggests, then no.
Beautiful, but 14th street/Union square is missing the L line
I'm not sure I can provide an actual quote on this and was more my understanding of what people are arguing, I could be mistaken, I'm not sure. But it would seem to me that accepting something of that form as true would be necessary in order to believe in many fairly standard feminist/whatever claims.

In particular, the controversy surrounding Damore's "manifesto" seems very hard to understand if most people believe that there are differences between the genders that could affect the "outcome"/gender gap in tech/whatever. If this in fact what everyone thinks, then why are so many people upset that someone wrote a document saying this is the case? The whole thing should to be a no-issue? (I guess some of the points of Aaronson's original blog post might be applicable here. But I'm not sure that really improves the situation...)

Secondly, if everyone agrees that there are differences between the genders that could affect for example the gender gap in tech, I have a very hard time understanding how one can routinely blame more or less any difference between the genders on discrimination or some such.