skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What brings a person to make a statement such as yours, without having read the material in question

Can't speak for any other person or any other case. But, here, I relied on a secondary source who has built a reputation with me for veracity even on contentious topics such as these, despite that he and I disagree on just about every prior in the world when it comes to matters of this sort. Unfortunately, he has disappointed me here, and I've thus made a factual error in an earlier comment which I have since acknowledged in a sibling thread to this one.

I'm not sure what effect that's likely to have on the whole larger point about Western society that you're trying to draw here. Seems like a lot of stew from one very small oyster, especially considering you're coming with this at a gay man who spent an entire day's worth of HN participation, a few months back, arguing that gay marriage is a bad idea both for the individuals involved and for the state. Came out net karma positive on it, too, which I found surprising. But I think there's a great deal in my prior commentary here that would surprise you, had you but bothered to look before you went running off on whatever this tangent is about how I'm an example of everything that's wrong with Western society, or I'm privileging my individual opinion of how things must be over the facts of the matter, or whatever.

If you want to talk about irony, how about the irony that inheres in making exactly the same mistake against which you inveigh when you see me make it, having incidentally failed to notice that, by the time you got around to trying to set me up as some kind of example of a failure in society as a whole, I'd already seen the error called out as such, requested substantiation of the counterclaim, received same, and clearly recognized that I'd erred? That seems pretty ironic to me!
See answer above. 80% tax rate is irrelevant if you structure in a way that you don't technically have income.
Could you elaborate? I myself haven't seen much compelling evidence against GMOs.
I hear some Americans here with pretty standard work income+pension savings say that they end up spending $1000+/year for an accountant who is educated in cross-border US taxes to prepare their filings that always end up as $0 owed. Seems like a massive burden to me.
I personally use DiskCryptor, but I am not super up-to-date on the best programs for encryption/decryption.

DiskCryptor does the job for me. Easy to use, open source.
This adds additional arguments to the discussion from a person who has a Ph.D in the area, and is the of the opposite gender of the original author.

I have also seen articles about legal action being taken which was news to me, also being flagged down.
If they're smart they'll include their TV channel content. Obviously the Disney brands, but also ESPN. That would put them in a VERY strong position.
> If there's such a large overlap between populations, as he claims in the first couple pages, why bother enumerating those differences in such extreme detail?

My major problem with the presentation (as opposed to the content) of the ideas in the memo is actually that he doesn't give the effect sizes when he hypothesizes alternative explanations. They may be given in the linked references, but so far I have not bothered hunting them down; and I have no idea whether it's worth my time before I have checked them all.
It’s not the least bit surprising, almost every endpoint tool out there leaks data.
So I read this article and do not see any merit or value.

The article mixes up genetics with what people end up doing in life.
But a retirement plan is a pension. Maybe it's a British English / American English thing, but to me a pension is any savings or investment you keep for retirement.
pvote.org seems like a decent solution, it's <500 lines of code that needs to be audited.

That doesn't handle auditing the machines themselves, but as the 2016 US presidential election recount found in Wisconsin, the tamper-evident machines showed evidence of tampering, so maybe we're closer to knowing whether the trusted systems we use to count votes are trustworthy.

Of course, the current machines are still Diebold ("Premier Election Solutions"), so who knows. Ken Blackwell will make sure only the right folks vote, anyway, just like he did in 2008.
but with spell-check disabled to give it a fair chance :)
Another one: https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manif...

Please show me the other well informed people that claim the opposite.
The article hides a common but incorrect assumption. Look at this paragraph:

> As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.

The assumption here is that employment in STEM industries fundamentally and solely involves "mechanically interesting things".

The reality is that tech companies are composed of people and make products for people. Google themselves have found through their own research that the best managers are defined by their people skills, not their technical skills. So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

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.

EDIT: this tweet puts it succinctly:

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

https://twitter.com/kelliotttt/status/894770623611682818
No.

In general, that depends on the hash function. Some hash functions have that property (e.g. you might want to use such a function for some internal data structure), but cryptographic hash functions must not. If you'd find some property where you could check if you're "getting close", then that would be a major flaw in that function - i.e., it's possible that SHA-3 has some way to do that, but as far as we know (and we've tried) it does not, and if it would be the case then that would be a good enough reason to stop using SHA-3 anywhere.
If anyone's interested, there's a brand of phones that's actively trying to change this: https://www.fairphone.com/en/

Contrary to other brands, they can actually try to fix it because they can also admit that this is an issue with their first two phones: because they're an awareness campaign as well, because they're documenting what issues they encounter and why it's so difficult, and because they want to be the trailblazer that figures out how to improve this situation, so other brands can copy their model.
Hey this sounds like a great setup. I've been wondering if Kotlin -> JavaScript could work for React. Do you have some more documentation or code that you could share on how to setup a project?
So the only alternative to paying for something you don't own is to steal it and pretend that you're somehow justified because you don't agree with the way the law is written?

In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under.

Could you expound on this a bit? Disney owns the rights to distribute the products that it has spent billions of dollars to create and you take issue with that? What is the alternative- if you write a best-selling novel, or create a film or a song that people want, the government should force you to distribute it in such a way that guarantees that anybody who wants it can have it? We're talking about movies, not health care. I don't really see how you can make a cogent case that you have a right to access the content on your terms.
I see very little support to your point. People who are wealthy now are not kids of those who were wealthy in the previous generation. Almost all wealth is self-made, because most wealth is in industries that didn't even exist a generation ago. And, whole lot of that wealth is not even capita, it is salaries. How in the world it prevents upward mobility? If anything, it facilitates it.

I know a ton of people who are rich, like, up to lower centimillion bucks rich (would be comfortably in top 0.01% of Americans). None of them come from wealthy families. Kids from wealthy families mostly enjoy upper-middle class, sinecure jobs secured by their daddies yes. They don't get to worry about anything in their lives, but they aren't rich either, most aren't even in top 1%
Well I work for Oracle and I get a piece of paper every year telling me how much money is in my 'Personal Pension Scheme'.
I encrypt lots of things. I use the following: To encrypt directories cryptsetup and encfs on linux, dmg on mac, geli on freebsd and git-crypt with private bitbucket repos for docs that I'd like to have a history log (commits).

I think that in your case, you could take a look at git-crypt, but make sure you understand what is encrypted and what is not. Also make sure you don't push before git-crypt lock. A bash prompt changing colours might be handy.
I don't like Donald Trump any more than the next person (and I would never vote for him), but watching people line up actively encouraging punishing (or firing) people based on who they voted for is crazy, especially because about half the country voted for the guy.

I come from a small town where Trump dominated Clinton, and most people I know voted for Trump holding their noses. They considered him to be a less-bad option, and Thiel even said as much in interviews. Yet folks are being smeared for being "complicit" and dragged as if they are Trump, or agree with everything he stands for.

I don't think that's ever happened before, at least publicly. Every candidate I've ever seen has major flaws, and people that lack those flaws and even despise those flaws voted for them anyway. I get that Trump is particularly incompetent, but if voting for a candidate that wins the election is a punishable offense maybe we should rethink our political activism.
> That, and the proliferation of sugar in our every-day diets has long-term consequences (who knew? /s)

This is pretty good guess for the reason for us lagging behind other countries.
You don't need to link your vote to aadhaar. Vote can be anonymized, but polling booths can still check and identify voters using aadhaar and easily avoid duplicate votes & rigging.
J&J Announces Encouraging First In-Human Clinical Data for HIV Preventive Vaccine
Mozilla bets its Rust language will make your internet safer
It's unfortunate how both political extremes are just the same:

The right uses the state to censure.

The left uses people and popularity to censure.

To fight the dictators I can simply join a militia and fight a civil war.

But how to I fight people? I'm not popular, I'm not cool, I'm not socially connected. I am no one. How do I maintain my rights when those depriving me of them are everyone else?

If I'm targeted by the populist mass, where is my recourse?

I'm lucky that I live in a country where I could just study and pass a test to be a public servant, where I'm guaranteed a job and won't be fired based on public outrage. But what about others?
Something discussed in the video. Google held "secret" diversity meetings, secret from the perspective of all meetings are usually recorded at Google and made available but these ones where specifically not apparently. James mentions that these meetings where used to discuss (allegedly) illegal hiring practices.

I'm not from the US, but as far as I understand what's generally labelled "positive discrimination" isn't just legal, is it not highly promoted? Just trying to understand what could be mean't from illegal if these hiring practices are widespread and encouraged.
Aren't they normally differentiated as Defined Benefit pensions vs Defined Contribution pensions.
"these uploaded files are easily discoverable and inspectable"

Any clues as to how they are this way? S3 buckets with credentials the same for all customers or similar?
I believe even smokers who die early from disease are cheaper in the long run compared to those who end up dying much later in life.

I think the same idea holds true for the obese because they tend to die early, as well.

Being old and sick is incredibly expensive. Living healthily enough to get to be old and sick is a monetary drain from insurance companies' perspectives.
I don't he denied that though did he. He specifically said women would prefer those roles.
The wonders of our consumerism. The golden age of pesticides, air, ground and water pollution. The golden age of MacDonald, KFC and Coca-cola and of super-size meals.

Maybe we should listen to the scientists when they say something is bad.
No, but it has to be free of devastating vulnerabilities.
Are they skewed left in the European sense or just the American?
I believe it's illegal in the US to fire someone for their political leanings, but not if you say something outrageous like women aren't built for tech jobs (or whatever he said).

That being said, it's never a good idea to get on a soapbox about politics at work (or anywhere really). It doesn't make a difference in your listeners opinions and only gets people with opposing views aggravated. Best to just think about the issues and vote come election.
"I have found a single sample from which I will generalize broadly about the entire country."
There's an interesting book about that dynamic where some unknown number of people privately doubt a core public value -- "preference falsification": https://www.amazon.com/Private-Truths-Public-Lies-Falsificat... I read it after the 2016 election, but it's pretty old -- is there newer work anyone can recommend?
Extending ReactPHP's Child Processes
You have to hang out with election administrators to grok that. Their motivations are not the same as the voters. Their election night prayer is "Please God, don't let this election be close."

They want certainty more than any thing else. For decades, computers were regarded as more accurate, impartial, certain than human tabulators.

Second factor is appropriations. Elections are big money. And like all industrires, there's a revolving door between government and industry.

Admin also want control. Their impulse is to centralize, simplify. Think of the logistics of running 100s of voting sites, 1,000s of precincts. All the training, people, materials, gear that has to be stored, shuttled around, repaired, etc. Moving to voting computers, reducing head count, moving to central count seemed like a huge win. (But you and I people computer people, we know they just traded problems.)
Let me explain.

I meant that there is only so much that technology can do. That, combined with bad eating habits in general, have a compounding effect on the mortality rate, especially at ages 70+ when heart attack risks are at their highest.
Yeah, for some reason banks and credit card providers seem to be worse at this than anybody else.
Regarding cognitive differences between men and women having a biological component: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

Regarding the quality and replicability of stereotype threat studies, that came in vogue after the seminal Steele & Aronson 1995 paper:

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/does-stereotype-t...

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/hidden-fig...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/12/30/is-stereotype-threat...
What an incredibly pointless edit.
Cognitive differences observed in GENERAL != bad engineers for ALL.

The memo was a rambling incoherent mess.
It's not that it's improving, it's that it's changing in every direction at light speed, and if you say went on holiday for a month offline when you come back the odds that you find the syntax and the ecosystem substantially different is very high. And whether all or most of these changes are indeed improving anything is doubtful. I personally can't follow JS anymore, it's a storm of not-so-news from every direction.
Lackademia: Why do academics lean left?
Ask HN: What happened to our willingness to discuss opposing views
I generally consider my political views to be in line with the (left-leaning) views of sillicon valley, mostly because opinions are formed by trying to understand what the other is saying and adapting the opinion when it turns out the other view makes more sense. At least that is what I used to think, before a now ex googler _internally_ published "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber".
I've seen so many people (on HN and elsewhere) forming damning opinions on the piece by repeating misinterpretations of the statement instead of actually reading the document. I don't fully agree with the document and do believe that some parts are a bit poorly worded, but I do not understand why this cannot be the starting point of an interesting discussion instead of a fire(both symbolic and literal). With him being fired I think this will only get worse, because there will certainly be people who think that he makes at least some valid points. Now instead of openly discussing this and thinking about what is right and what is wrong, they will no longer re-evaluate their opinion by discussing it due to fear of being fired.
When did we start dismissing people we disagree with in such a tasteless manner? Or am I just interpreting this whole situation incorrectly?
> That conflates two different things: what gender roles a society imposes on adults, and how the society socializes children. Those two things are not necessarily linked. Take India for example: it's not very egalitarian; women are still strongly encouraged to stay home with kids (and the work force is 70% men). On the other hand, half of STEM majors in India are women. How do you explain that result if you assume that preferences are biological?

Presumably because they're not free to choose what they would prefer, and instead do what their family expects of them.

Of course, we're getting back into your "women make a choice because they've been socialized to make it" territory here, which I find pretty convincing.
His words are in conflict with each other. He's not referring to any given individual, but he is referring to the system that got those individuals into Google, often due to alleged unfair/discriminatory practices. That inherently means he must view at least some of those individuals as unqualified. That's a conflict, and the end result is that some individuals in Google may take it personally (independent of other reactions around identity this evokes). Is that so hard to empathize with?

Also, why you do you accuse me of taking it personally? I do not. I also would never tell anyone they should take it personally. But I can understand why they would, and we know some people have. It seems presumptuous to me that we should tell those most-implicated by this memo dealing with emotionally-charged topics directed toward subgroups they are a part of (that have historically not been treated fairly) that they shouldn't take it personally. That does not mean I think Google will prevail in a lawsuit (which probably won't happen as a settlement seems most likely) based on the publicly-available facts.
What I find interesting about all this is how many people take personal offense from statistics. (and conclusions drawn from statistics)

The author seems to put an effort into explaining statistical distribution and what it means and what not. He's explicit that statistical observations can't be used to judge particular individuals. Draws a graph of overlapping distributions to drive the point home even more.

I'm not sure why would anyone get offended by statistical observation. It's not personal by definition.
The American sense.

Europeans might disagree and say that all Americans are on the right.
But that is not related to "shortage of women in tech/STEM". More women in management wouldn't change that.

Maybe it is just difficult to put managers without experience in the trenches in front of people? That is, managers who have no tech skills as such?
Texmaker 5.0.1
As an additional perspective, here's an interview from James' perspective[1]. The interviewer is clearly fairly bias and holds the same viewpoint which is unfortunate but I think hearing James' perspective on the purpose of the document is interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agU-mHFcXdw
Isn't callback hell referencing to the fact that you can't easily access the previous result of computation without nesting closures inside one another?

It seems to me that first time I really avoided cb hell is when I started using async/await.
>For example, whether or not GMO issues are horseshit or not doesn't matter when anyone who speaks out is given a gag order or when we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage and our systems are so fucked we aren't even allowed to ask about it without getting sued into oblivion.

And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science, and insisting that GMOs must be perfectly safe, "because science" -- when most of the research and assurances is from companies looking for a quick buck, not impartial scientists (which almost don't exist anymore the way they did when academic/research jobs where plenty, scientists were often independently wealthy, and tenure a sure thing).
it might be true, but it's just not pragmatic to just say "America did it"

The US dictators, banks, corporations and citizens are ruling, financing, lobbying and voting for this regardless. To solve the problem each of these need their incentives aligned (e.g. give dicators a better deal for not allowing this, limit profitability of cobalt mining to the banks, force coprorations to declare "cruelty free", write articles like this one to influence citizens to vote for favourable policies).
Just to make sure I am correct, your 401k gets matched with 0.004 of your total pay? Thanks
> I believe it's illegal in the US to fire someone for their political leanings, but not if you say something outrageous like women aren't built for tech jobs (or whatever he said).

It's easy to circumvent the legal issue, just have a vague code of conduct and claim the employee broke said code of conduct.
Some people may have reacted that way. I think you're very intentionally trying mischaracterize people rolling their eyes the same way they always do as some sort of ignorant knee-jerk reaction.

I read the memo entirely. It was half-baked, ideologically, but also creepy. I've heard what it had to say a million times before and it's still stupid.
Brunswick's creepy bridge – 25 concrete faces, not one nose and no one knows why
Success in remote cultures has a major dependency on leadership as well. I've helped a client start a company who was dead set on having a remote engineering team until he realized that he wasn't comfortable with it. He would have said "they were all bad at remote" but really he was a micromamager with trust issues.
^ wholeheartedly agree.
I suspect the close association with copyright infringement means that BitTorrent is a little toxic for many corporations.
Your analogy to race is wrong.

There is no research (to the best of my knowledge) claiming that there are biological differences between the same sex of different races.

But there is enough research about biological differences between sexes (and some differences are obvious, such as different hormones, etc) to at least warrant a debate.

"Sexist" is one of a handful of words that have become absolutely sacred in the US, at the expense of scientific discovery (or common sense, or both).
This article is really misleading. You have to explicitly turn on the feature to upload files, and the product warns you explicitly of the implications when you try to enable it.
very true. He also seems to have been pandering to his newly found audience of authoritarians too which is an odd position for a proclaimed libertarian. Plus the old "not an argument" line that he throws around a lot.