skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A quote widely attributed to Steve Jobs: "good artists copy, great artists steal." Turns out he wasn't really the first to say that or express that sentiment [0], but it'd be hard to argue that Mac OS (at least back in the 80s) didn't heavily rely on copied or stolen features.

[0] http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
Are contactless terminals widespread in Germany?

On a short trip last month, I surprised a couple of merchants by paying contactlessly with my foreign (EU) card.

That's almost always faster than paying by cash, since there's no need to count the money or make change. The exception is when the cost is €20, and I can hand over a single note.
It's totally fine for Sergey Brin to have an affair with his subordinate Amanda Rosenberg.
> In case you’re not familiar, a meritocracy is a political system where power is allocated to those with the most ability. In the case of Silicon Valley, this equates to “the best ideas win and the best people get promoted.”

IMHO the problem is that no-one, not even this article, actually defines what 'merit' means — so people fill it with their own (likely biased) opinions. Even in the above quote, 'best' is only defined after the fact — it's literally just the ones that survived (the article does mention this later on).

The meaning of 'merit' will probably be different for different companies, groups, etc. Hence it feels difficult to talk about any kind of 'meritocracy' without clarifying that meaning first. I suspect that would become it's own debate.

Edit: The interactive site called Parable of the Polygons would seem relevant to some of the points this article makes. http://ncase.me/polygons/
Got to chuckle about this. The new generation is fearless and naked. Break it all, admit nothing, make it 'better'.

Standards, practices, tradition, culture. They mean nothing when a devops lead has commit rights to the ansible playbook and a will to deliver a fix in 5 seconds flat.
https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbleacher...
Well there's a start (but the bittorrent people should shout about those sorts of uses)
If politics is to be kept out of the workplace, does that mean everyone who participated in this should be fired?

https://www.theverge.com/google/2017/1/30/14446466/google-im...
Not German and I don't think there was ever such hyperinflation here, but same reasons basically.

- fast enough

- no problems with failing electronic payments of all kinds

- more places where it works (electronic payment systems can indeed be an extra cost which matters for small businesses)

- cash doesn't break (cards do)

- still easier to transfer directly between people

- pretty private
> Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed.

Are you saying the study is flawed because women got more hires in this context and that doesn't reflect the larger aggregate trends? You realize this study doesn't reflect society as a whole, right? It reflects the resume screening habits of a sample of people from a cross section of law firms.

Rather than dismissing a study because it doesn't yield results that fit your worldview, how about you try understanding the context is was done in and reflecting on the culture where it happened? Don't give it a fleeting thought. Really consider the many possible stories it could be telling you, but don't settle on a favorite. Hold the many possible stories in your head instead, ask questions and try different stories.

People have all sorts of biases. I've known my share of bros who only hire pretty girls and other bros with common interests, taste and upbringing. If they were being studied, their numbers would probably yield similar results. Some of the bros I know would call in like-minded bros and then they'll call in the women for an interview to see if they're hot. If they were part of a similar study, their screening habits would definitely skew the numbers toward this trend. If it was up to me, I'd be counting how many of the pretty ones made into round two. (Let's just say they excel at recruiting and only hiring pretty girls.)

This is one small study that reflects an aggregate of biases of a sample of participants in one industry. It does not reflect the world. It doesn't reflect their industry. It doesn't reflect one bias. It is literally a snapshot in time of a sample of a cross section of society. We don't know how if those biases (there are many) were well-distributed or concentrated. Repeating the experiment may even yield very different results.

All that doesn't matter in the bigger picture, because for that slice of time & sample, we have enough evidence to suggest gross discrimination for that sample and time.

It's a reminder that the world is a complicated place and that there are all sorts of ways people discriminate against each other. What it reinforces is that superficial discrimination happens for all sorts of complex reasons, rather than simply saying everyone is guilty of one form of discrimination.

> One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.

Let's not be obtuse about accepting or dismissing these studies. People have a tendency to either overstate or discount their results when it serves their purpose. I gave you a very small sample and merely suggested that discrimination happens in the world and that discrimination can be complex and nonlinear. Take it with a grain of salt.
If you think that is a problem with debit cards you should go get a better bank.
Freedom of Speech is a principle. It has a value on it's own. I wish more people would see that.
aka "policy". Also self correcting, but with a longer time scale.
What, like Porsche/VW? Or countless other closely held or family companies?
I think tax is the killing factor. Most of small shops don't want to reveal how much they earn, thus resisting against electronic payments.
Nice catch. I used to think Quartz had some quality standards.
Apparently it's your hobby horse, but there's no reason an analogy has to adhere to the topic of identity politics. Few people give active thought to the advantages they're born into or receive throughout life - that the GP thinks people advantaged by hiring preferences would prefer to have been hired some other way is just a failure to comprehend human psychology. Unless they're writing a blog on the topic, most people are more busy with their jobs and lives to care about their hiring process.
Expressing opinions that make employees feel less adequate due to their gender is a violation of the CoC. I applaud restricting that kind of speech, as do most companies. At some companies the motivation might be strictly legal, but regardless of the motivation you're going to get fired if you open the company up to future gender discrimination lawsuits.

"many points raised in the memo ... are important topics."

So what? Other points were a violation of the CoC. Goodbye, good luck, see you around the campus!
Gary Bernhardt has a great live screencast where he writes a compressor - for anyone that found this hard to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Eu9ZVZEZ3I
> CC is slow, at least in Switzerland. Like in Germany, efficiency is baked into the culture - people hate to wait on someone paying his chocolate bar with credit card.

I pay with my card faster than the vast majority of people with cash. I also worked as a cashier during school, my favorite people were the older ones who'd just hand me their wallet so I could take the best mix of coins for the payment. Most people are horribly slow when trying to pay optimally.

Anyway, at least here in Germany the whole NFC thing seems to be taking off and card payments are even faster now.
Is this really true for Android? I know Apple hides your CC number but I'm unsure about Android.
yes, I did read it. and yes, that's precisely the argument that was presented. with a nice "we should talk about it!" cherry on top.

there's nothing to discuss. women have just as much right as men to be programmers or any other "computer science" or "tech" job and they reason there AREN'T that many of them is preicsely because of the pseudo-science bona fide bullshit written in his "Manifesto".

it only takes one asshole to drive away everyone else.
The Journey to 1M Downloads
True. Except it may be able to be used as a proxy for larger economic issues. If borrowers are defaulting on their car loans at a higher rate than usual, it begs the questions: "why" and "why now"?
I disagree. It's impossible to critique certain issues such as those pertaining to gender without offending people. But if someone is going to get offended because someone presented an alternative viewpoint to what they believe, than that's their problem.

Imagine if we weren't allowed to debate, say, programming languages or SQL vs. NoSQL because one side needs to be coddled and can't take the heat. That's essentially what we're doing with "diversity" policies and gender dynamics.
You should never wear a polo regardless of brand
Upthread someone has the right answer to the "real problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14958382 - zoning.
Years ago I collected all change for 6 months without spending any. Afterwards I counted all to see how much of each type of coin I have collected during this time. The idea was to see if it is worth bothering collecting all coins or is there are a cut-off for me as I dislike having carrying really thick and heavy wallet. It turned out that for my pattern of cash use collecting coins bellow 10 cents really wasn't worth it.

A few years ago I visited Berlin again and tried to leave few cents in local supermarket. It was the only time while being there that I can remember people giving me unfriendly looks. Cashier was also visibly unhappy.
For a property appraised at 400k a short term vacation policy would cost you ~$2100/year .
I'd mostly agree with you, but this was not an "in general" opinion that he posted to some "off topic" list. It was a direct opinion about the policies of his company. There is no better place to disagree with your companies internal hiring policies, than on an internal mailing list.
The Congressional Map Has a Record-Setting Bias Against Democrats
Calling it a "manifesto" is only being done by the media though, it's a memo, or at best the first post on a forum topic.

A "memo" thats primary focus was to have an open discussion based on statistical evidence and ideally foster a more welcoming environment to people who are not currently represented as well as Google would like.
I personally have a problem with this. Sure sitting on your arse and enjoying the income is a good thing, but in a situation where there is a housing shortage, it is definitely a scummy thing to do. Each to their own of course.

I am so tired of seeing the government line "supply and demand". Maybe if people weren't allowed to own 30 homes simply because they existed before an incredible housing boom there wouldn't be so much of a problem.
You switched your argument from one comment to another; it's unclear what your position is.
Where on earth did you go to school? Was it a public school? I moved around a lot as a kid and no where did I learn any of the things you mentioned.
Ubuntu Foundations Development Summary: August 8, 2017
*Credit card workflow:
- Cashier tells you the total amount

- You look in your wallet/purse

- You swipe card/insert in chip reader

- You avoid making eye contact while the transaction is processed

- (optional) The card reader fails and requests reinsertion. Repeat previous two steps

- Done
Just keep a couple hundred in your pocket, like everybody else and their grandma.
If politics is to be kept out of the workplace, should everyone who participated in this be punished?

https://www.theverge.com/google/2017/1/30/14446466/google-im...

Sure seems like it's only conservative politics at the workplace being punished.
In a socialist society, you'd live where the state puts you, and any back-talk would be regarded as a mental disease (sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia, for one the USSR like to use) and treated as such.

Also, I doubt the socialist state would be able to supply a new home before I was ready for a state-supplied grave.
This was only ever true in online discussion forums, Usenet, etc.

I agree that there is a lot of mob mentality going on, it’s just difficult to get upset about this case because the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments. Twitter replies are mostly full of men who didn’t read the original memo or who are willfully pretending it didn’t claim women are less biologically suited to being engineers.

I like Pichai’s memo and I think it sets the right tone: the offending employee could have raised these same arguments without falling back to debunked stereotypes. He could have done an hour of Googling on the topic and educated himself. Instead he trusted his own feelings in an area he had no experience or knowledge in.

This seems to be a trait relatively common among really smart people: doctors who think they’re good at politics, mechanical engineers who think they’ve discovered a theory that overturns all of physics, or in this case a software engineer that thinks he knows better than thousands of scientists doing experiments and crunching the actual data.

As far as I can tell we can have rational critical discussions in tech - we just can’t get away with spouting nonsense. If that nonsense reinforces old sexist or racist stereotypes then we can expect a backlash.
I'm really quite meetable. Just drop me a line at lukec@taconic.net or if you use Facebook you can contact me there.
There was a political rally in Google Campuses in Feb 2017. So, may be you vanilla comments are generally applicable, Google has sort of exempted itself.

Now some people in Google are creating black-lists of colleagues.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/07/revealed-inside-goo...
I don't know why, but we don't have many pickpockets here in Germany.

Probable reasons:

We don't have that much poor people here.

The few that are, get social aid from the public/country.

The few that aren't happy with the amount of money they get, can collect bottles, which give you 0,25€ per bottle. Few hours of bottle collecting in a big city is easy money on the side.

So most poor people here can make 10-20€ a day on the side legally.

Food is really cheap in Germany, so people don't have to carry around much money. Most of the time I only have below 50€ on me and only on bigger travels in the country-side I take more.

So I think there is simply no reason to risk getting caught stealing an amount of money you can easily make legally.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Meritocracy is not perfect, but explicit discrimination is so incredibly prone to abuse and corruption that is not even a contest. Society is made of individuals. We can hope they strive towards a phenotype-blind process, and shun the ones that explicitly discriminate. Or we can institutionalize explicit discrimination and raise everyones awareness to phenotype discrimination. For which the rational self-interest response is to discriminate. Trapping us all into an endless prisoner dilemma lose-lose tarpit.
In highschool, I always got to hear that I'm a "loser computer nerd" while the cool girls wanted to do media, social and similar stuff. I studied CS (95% male students). How can anyone be surprised by men being the majority. In schools there are like 75% female teachers (I'm in Germany). Should male rebel?

You have to do diversity actions before age 10 if you want to do it right.

(Yes, this is anecdotal, yet fairly typical, I guess)
BTW why is no one in NFL signing on Kapernick? There are always consequences for controversial actions. BTW the writer of the article is really young guy. Hopefully he will grow up one day.
You can get up to 2% - 2.5% easily but that's with annual fees or points instead of direct cashback.

I'm alright with 1% in direct cash without any fees. That's not a lot but hey, it's beer money!
They advocate for inclusion but oftentimes want their kind of inclusion. For example they may want women to go out and vote, so long as they vote for their candidate. How dare they "vote against their self interest". Like when Hispanics get ostracized for voting republican as if they owe it to Democrats to vote for them.
Facebook says it’s removing accidental clicks from its ad network
Uber Plans to Wind Down U.S. Car-Leasing Business
Would he have gone too far to suggest that women are inherently physically weaker than men? Or that they are inherently longer-lived than men?

What about that they are inherently less interested in football?
There is a distinction only if you mean holding all your cash in your own safe, when you say "cash". You will need to get a bank account anyway as transactions of a certain kind and size (like getting your monthly wage and buying a car) need to go through a bank.

There is zero practical difference if you withdraw from an ATM every other day or more often, so you can pay cash.
At the heart of the problem:

> Public policy contributes to the generational standoff. Property-tax exemptions for longtime residents keep older Americans from moving. Zoning rules make it harder to build affordable apartments attractive to senior citizens.

It's moreso about gov policies than it is about generational differences.
Or, you are able to find at least one on the internet that does.
Looks like the Bitcoin laws are v favourable in DE. You can pay taxes in BTC(!) & BTC is a unit of account[0]. That makes sense if the memory of WR hyperinflation is written to the citizens' mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country...
> Only works if the amount is less then 25 EUR but still it is much faster then cash.

For my card (N26) I can still use the feature but I'll have to enter my pin. Still faster than sticking it into the slot.
Pretty good actually. Just write me at lukec@taconic.net or comment on one of my Facebook pages.
Yet another discussion of gender roles. Don't read this report if you work at Google!
Poppin is hiring a Back end Java Developer
Poppin is hiring a Backend Java Developer
In the US you are protected by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act so the bank can't turn you away based on your age. That said though - you do need to show sufficient income to qualify.
Funny lots of people found it very coherent. https://archive.is/VlNfl
Deeplearning.ai is Andrew Ng’s new series of deep learning classes on Coursera
Are you accounting for the benefit to workers of not having (some) authority? Decision-making itself can be extremely stressful! Ceding authority to someone else also relieves you of the associated responsibility and that can and probably does have significant benefits e.g., psychologically, emotionally.

Consider a pretty analogous industry – musicians, musical artists, etc. I've noticed that a lot of 'bands' I like are really 'dictatorships' run by a single highly-motivated artist that recruits other musicians to act as 'employees' to realize their, the dictator's, vision. It doesn't seem inherently bad to allow people to be employees.

Regardless, it seems impossibly to perfectly negate any advantages (or disadvantages) of "exploiting workers". I think a better vision is to help and encourage everyone to become more 'powerful', e.g. more skilled, wealthier, open to more possibilities. But I also admit I don't have a plan to prevent the already-powerful from becoming more powerful themselves, and at a faster rate than everyone else. I'm still undecided whether that's generally good or bad. Perhaps it's (effectively) undecidable!
You also have to consider the fact that the older generation will lobby against government policies that would weaker their position.
I'm pretty sure the UK defence industry isn't run primarily to equip our armed forces with decent equipment....

[Edit: UK armed forces seemed to have to suffer comparatively poor but very expensive equipment foisted on them for political reasons].
Sorry, I assumed you were from the US. The British seem to at least be self-aware. Here in Canada we've always lived under the shadow of our neighbour, so we hear about American Exceptionalism all the time. Even that word, "American" I find somewhat offensive. It's as if they forget that there are 34 other countries on this continent.
I agree hence my comment.
For me personally i'm looking at paying our main property off and call it a day. No more mortgage, no more bank that can get my house in case something happens etc etc. Plus with no more mortgage and other bank payments your life becomes a bit simpler.

The market is sill there for housing, if the market supports new housing they will be built.
> reacting to a clear violation.

If it's so clear, then could you specify exactly which parts of the memo were "fair to debate" (as Pichai says) and which part were "clear violation?"
Thank you. To be mentioned in the same breath with the Orange Man is enough to ruin my day.
This hits the nail right on the head! Current home owners are very clearly incentivized to restrict housing supply. Zoning reforms should be at the forefront of discussions on how to address the current housing crisis.
> Credit card workflow:

> - Cashier tells you the total amount

> - You look in your wallet/purse

> - You swipe card/insert in chip reader

> - Done

You forgot the part where you have to enter you PIN and wait for the transaction to go through, or sign the receipt.
The real issue is how much a corporation can enforce "correct" opinions among it's employees. This was an internal company forum. He expressed opinions that deviated from company policy (and from the sounds of it a lot of other employees at Google disagreed as well) and a lively debated ensued. OK that what sounds like a healthy thing to have happen and get ideas out there and agreed upon or shot down. However by firing him that sends a very clear message that any deviation from the norm will not be tolerated. That's not diversity, that is an attempt at moral conformity.
Not German, but I simply don't want to leave my trail of what I am spending and where.
Deep Learning Coursera Courses from Andrew Ng
Depending on how survey questions are asked most people (>75%) express at least some interest in parenthood.
Examples please
As a German
a.) I mostly pay by credit card because it is way faster. By using paywave you can pay instantly at all larger shops and supermarkets.
b.) The shops need to pay up to 1.7%. If you compare this against the time saved by not returning change and having to carry a money cassette every evening to their bank the saving potential is big.
I try to not use cash anymore, but fail to do so in smaller shops or at the hair stylist.
Jon Bentley showed this can have problems with overflow. Better,

mid = left + (right - left)/2;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm#Implem...
Contactless is wonderful, especially now the receipt for smaller items is effectively being phased out; couldn't the receipt-handling just get handed over to banks, ultimately? That could be really useful...

I still use cash, probably more than the average. There are just a handful of situations - paying for a newspaper, or at my local bakery - where it feels more 'natural' to me to use cash, but I'm sure that feeling will go eventually!
Not surprisingly Germany has one of the highest household savings rates in Europe. In fact almost all the top countries are German speaking or have German as an official language.[1]

[1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=51648
Not very surprising, it had to come from somewhere.
The Indus Valley Civilization is quite well known amongst[0] Indians, and it does predate these Mittani's mentioned in this article.

All that aside, its very interesting.
Also incredibly sad to see an entire nation wearing a language as a golden cloak, with a dagger hidden beneath it for the people it deems unworthy of it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation
The Most Basic Framework for Developing an A/B Test Hypothesis
Airsonic 10.0.0 Released