skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent two weeks at that plant and therefore went through safety training on the first day. It was eye opening to see just how serious-not-serious they treated the whole thing.

The supervisor asked each person to introduce themselves as a way of proving they could speak and understand English, and therefore the training. When a few failed, he gave a lecture about how critical safety training is and that this wasn't the Spanish class, but then simply moved along and eventually graduated everyone.

The class was also full of not so bright people. I'm sorry, I'm not sure the politically correct way of talking about this. But the kind of people I wouldn't trust for a second with my life.

This was my first and only time in a factory so I'm not sure how par that all is for the course.
The whole article is fascinating, but this part was very surprising:

> Shereshevsky avoided such things as reading the newspaper over breakfast because the flavors evoked by the printed words clashed with the taste of his meal.

I've heard of synesthesia, but I never knew it could have real-life consequences like this.

Unrelated: That's the first time I've seen the word "reëxperience" with an umlaut. Wiktionary has it as an "alternative form" [1]. And I found this Wikipedia article [2], which says you can use it in other words, like: coöperative, daïs and reëlect. And apparently it's called a "diaeresis". So that was interesting to learn. It's also interesting that the New Yorker must follow a style guide that requires diaereses.

Oh wow, I just found the New Yorker article specifically about their usage of diaereses. [4]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reexperience

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

[4] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-t...
As a self-described libertarian that would be impossible to square with Thiel's rather famous quote: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
I think he used this one, or a close relative? http://style64.org/c64-truetype
Successful companies follow the way of the money. Everything else is charade.
> Maybe a googler can explain how and why this has exploded into the zeitgeist

Not a Googler, but it is pretty clear that it has exploded because the subject matter intersects with prominent issues in the (increasingly literal rather than figurative) culture war in America.
> If Google has a mono-culture that's not open to debate about gender and diversity issues, it's neither my business nor my concern

1. Many people feel discriminated against due to these affirmative action policies. If there were policies set in stone saying white men got precedence over black women, would you say "who the hell cares?"

2. The opinions expressed by that Googler are held by many people employed in the company. The fact that the company would sooner fire him instead of discussing the points he raised and explain why he's wrong seems to confirm his claim that there is an echo chamber, which isn't exactly conducive to a meritocratic structure.

3. Google is an incredibly large multinational corporation. What happens there will set precedent for companies around the world. If AA weakens there, it's a sign that corporate policies may change globally.
> It would be very odd if the brain needed something as ineffective as _language_ to think.

Not that much. I wouldn't be surprised if the invention of human language enabled us to use an improved way of thinking, by serialising thoughts more efficiently or some other kind of mechanism.

I don't think I use language most of the time (unless thinking about a discussion specifically, and then it's not always in the same language the discussion will be/was carried in, by the way) but I do write things down when I need to really think about them precisely and it helps a lot.
It would be circumstancial evidence only. Unless you find a body, traveling to the points X, Y and Z is not a proof of murder. And even if you find it, another person could have done this to incriminate this man or for unknown motives. We don't know if the journalist had enemies.

Of course such info would be really useful to start a searching but a dumped body can move with the sea currents so if is found in point X could have been dumped (or drowned accidentally) in the point W in fact.
It's possible the officer's approach to the situation/suspect contributed to causing the result. Perhaps use a whole different approach (less aggressive and more conversational), or tase the guy sooner, or back off until you have backup before continuing the encounter. The outcome might've been the same regardless, and the cop did not deserve to get shot, but cops need to realize that just issuing commands aggressively may not be the best approach and the job may require more nuance especially given the target demographic.
I knew someone would invoke time. I'm aware of 4D space-time as a possible visualization scheme for 4 dimensions.

By '2D or 3D space', I specifically meant being able to experience 3+ dimensions the way we experience 2 or 3 spatial dimensions.
You'd think software people, of all people, would understand that systems have their own emergent behaviour that doesn't simply reflect the behaviour of the nodes.
> Pirates would have to modify impractical amounts of binary code

FTFY
While true, the BBC has always taken current popular media as a platform to have a frank discussion about the issues that media explores. It's not intended to advertise the film, so much as expand on the events portrayed for those who came out of the film wanting to know more.
I've read about the 10 Mythical Creatures of Baidu[0] a few times, and while my Mandarin is too poor to have gotten any of the jokes without explanation, it seems like it would have been quite funny to run across any in the wild.

[0]: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/baidu-10-mythical-creatures-gr...
I believe his thesis was: gender diversity policies are not rooted in realities of gender differences.

(but he makes factual errors, so his argument is false)
“Spaceland” was also a hoot. It’s his take on the classic “Flatland”.
I don't think they should learn, it would take too much time. But hire tech recruiters that are already programmers.
Wow... a lot of those work samples are surprisingly unimpressive.

I would think that an agency would only feature their best designs, in which case I'd hate to see what the median looks like.
This is literally what the memo said.
I think everyone should learn to code, but dancers probably think everyone should learn to dance. Dancing is fun, coding is fun.
I would argue that this particular character was actually very receptive to the idea of still being part of society - he certainly doesn't come off as a individualistic idealogue.

He set a goal of being totally self-sustained, and achieved some amount of it, while eventually recognizing that the cost of such an experiment was higher than he had initially thought. The whole article ends with him coming to terms with the fact that society is necessary in so many ways, and that we can perhaps achieve sustainability easier as a collective, than as an individual.
How about:

Google's current programs are ineffective and discriminatory, so alternative programs and work culture should be considered to achieve higher diversity.
Is PyTorch actually faster than TensorFlow with the C++ static compilation?
Brilliant – Math and science done right
It's not as if someone can just learn to code casually. There's years and years of vital knowledge only attainable with experience. Learning JavaScript won't help them recruit for C++. Learning SQL won't let them know MSSQL is a fork of Sybase.

Learning just enough to be even more ineffective is more like it.
I would generally agree with you except for the fact that Google - through both algorithms and manual tweaking - determines what most people see on a daily basis.

If Google is a monoculture and yet allows or even encourages dissenting opinion and discussion, we have absolutely nothing to worry about. Alternatively, if Google is a monoculture and forces that monoculture on its visitors and users, then any out/other group is going to suffer and potentially not even realize it.

And it turns out that the subtle manipulation is incredibly effective:

> "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated."

Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
Well, how can one determine which addons are multi-process compatible?
They can research more into the position and understand better what a qualified candidate is.
This was, in large part, the original rationale for BART. You'd drive a few miles from your suburban home to the nearest station, and then take the train under the bay and get off near your office downtown.

But then jobs in the bay area became much less concentrated in downtown SF, and those massive parking lots in faraway BART stations went underutilized.
It's unfortunate but they operate in a sufficiently grey area of law that they really need to bend over backwards to comply with the wishes of someone who owns or may own the content. I don't particularly like it either but I understand why they feel it's a prudent policy.
Indeed, this plays into their narrative of hippy-dippy Berkeley liberal feminist handouts entitlement cosmopolitan California.
I wonder if, in some place like India, could all of the floppy parts be left to small businesses and local shops? Automated cars would deliver themselves to customers, with utilitarian interiors and utilitarian race-inspired webbing and harnesses, then be driven by the new owner to a customizing shop. I understand that trucks are sold somewhat like this, minus the automation.
America's Foxconn. Just not as well run.
I've found value in adopting bits and pieces. We have a small team (2 developers, sometimes more) and we're balancing bug fixes/customer needs/putting out fires/new development. Some guidance about where we're going and what we're walking on keeps us from focusing on the wrong things, but at the same time, when there's 2 developers you have to minimize overhead. I use a backlog and "sprints" (just a range of dates really). I assign points to have a bit of a clue (since I have to be able to answer what's on my plate and give some guidance as to when things may be completed). Nothing is sacrosanct: bugs get points the same as new development, since to the business it's all revenue blockers. A sprint is never carved in stone; any thing can be put in at any time, and priorities can be shifted, as they necessarily must. I don't do planning poker, standups, or retros ... daily communication via Slack is sufficient. We have no made up jobs like "scrum master". To me it's just a framework, in the same way that TDD or MVC are. You adopt pieces that help you get shit done, and ignore the pieces that get in the way of getting shit done.
This reminds me of Liftware products[1]. They make self stabilizing utensils for a similar market. Pretty cool stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNwfXeLlqsU
I thought that some of these points were digs at how the Broken Age kickstarter went and how that game was compromised on so many levels by modernisation until I've read the date.
I think at the moment, TensorFlow has a better tooling and deployment story with tools like TensorBoard[1], Tensor Processing Units in Google Cloud[2], distributed training[3], and deploying to mobile apps[4].

As time passes, PyTorch will probably get better at all of these things, but the core team and surrounding community need to make it a priority.

Meanwhile, Google's investment in TensorFlow will continue, and there's no sign that it will be a bad bet for large-scale deployments... even if PyTorch becomes the favored system for prototyping.

[1]: https://www.tensorflow.org/get_started/summaries_and_tensorb...

[2]: https://www.servethehome.com/google-cloud-tpu-details-reveal...

[3]: https://www.tensorflow.org/deploy/distributed

[4]: https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile/
When not to use a regex
> If Google is a monoculture and yet allows or even encourages dissenting opinion and discussion, we have absolutely nothing to worry about. Alternatively, if Google is a monoculture and forces that monoculture on its visitors and users, then any out/other group is going to suffer and potentially not even realize it.

I understand there's an issue of trust, however every Googler will tell you that impartiality of search results is an overriding priority.
You are probably being downvoted due to your terrible typo.
I thinkk it is more that you aged, rather than the game.
It's great puerile teen-age humor about bodily fluids, zombies, pirates wrapped in a picaresque coming of age story -- the perfect mix for a nerdy teenager, not so much for a cynical middle-aged seen-it-all...
> Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the company’s gender diversity policies and made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs.

> This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo.

People encouraging a 'charitable' reading of the memo have argued that the memo says that Google shouldn't aim for 50/50 diversity as a goal (or that increasing gender representation as an end in itself is likely to lead to sub-optimal outcomes), and that women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles. I'm really trying quite hard to think where the misrepresentation comes in, or indeed, if it's not about that, what the memo is actually about.
A common misconception. Solar does work in Washington, both halves of it, and a lot of people are installing it here. We get more sun than solar-happy Germany and it is more efficient here than in sunny-but-hot Phoenix because cooler panels work better. Hydro is cheap and plentiful and built before solar systems were even technically feasible.

(FWIW, "we" is also a misnomer. PSE gets the majority of its power from coal and natural gas[3], while Seattle City Light is overwhelmingly hydro[4], as is Snohomish PUD[5].)

0 - http://www.seattle.gov/light/solarenergy/

1 - http://www.pugetsoundsolar.com/solar-in-seattle.html

2 - http://www.seattlepi.com/realestate/article/Solar-power-a-ha... (Pointing out that the relative low cost of power means the payback for solar is longer, not that it is less efficient)

3 - https://www.pse.com/aboutpse/EnergySupply/Pages/Electric-Sup...

4 - http://www.seattle.gov/light/FuelMix/

5 - http://www.snopud.com/PowerSupply.ashx?p=1105
It may be true that Thiel doesn't believe one of the three things dragonwriter listed, however:

1. The quote being discussed doesn't require this.

2. If Peter Thiel doesn't like democracy (and therefore would like no one to vote) it would be misleading (although technically accurate) to describe that as Peter Thiel not wanting women/minorities to vote.
That's basically how I decide whether to trust someone's intentions.

But I look at actions to decide whether to trust them regarding the outcome of their future actions. And most of the time that one is a lot more important.

Well meaning people do terrible things all the time, we all know what the road to hell is paved with after all.

So no, I don't trust you, nor do I trust your coworkers. I do generally trust your intentions. While you are trying to be good people and that is a good thing, you are not good people. Because good people both mean to do good and actually perform good works.
I find a lot of these homebrew and ROM hacking documents are written for an enthusiast that might not necessarily have a background in software development.

At first I found it a little disorienting because the technical level of the writing would fluctuate, but at the same time I can appreciate it being accessible for someone who might not know much about programming.
Peter Thiel understands Special Circumstances. don't know whether existing SC-like organisations understand Peter Thiel.
> Floppy things are hard to automate

I'm so stealing that and extending it to:

Floppy or squishy things are hard to automate.
"I am not a product."

What makes you so special? :-)

I completely believe you when you say that Google-the-People want to do right by users. Unfortunately, Google-the-Company doesn't feel the necessity to have a support infrastructure to address those cases when your neural network makes a wacky decision, among other things. To Google-the-company, I am most definitely a product.

The bad part is that Google-the-Company is the only Google entity I interact with. You are cflewis-the-HN-poster; you might be able and willing to help me if I run afoul of Google-the-Company, but I can hardly expect that. More to the point, that doesn't scale.

So, the answer is, does it matter?
He clarified that he didn't want to revoke rights to vote explicitly as an addendum to the essay (see bottom):

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

And the books in the "The Little Schemer" series.

I would also suggest "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" but this is not from MIT Press.
>If a plane has a serious issue 10 000 feet off, every one in it will die

Complete nonsense, unless you tautologically define "serious" to mean "fatal".
> Combining is to combine items in your inventory to contraptions.

Combining is also just acting with you selecting an object first.

Daedalic removed the verbs entirely, and made left mouse button act, right button look.

To combine, you click on an inventory item, and then on another item or object.

To talk, you click on a person.

To flip a switch, you click it.

To look at stuff, you can always right-click.

Daedalic has made many games in the spirit of the old Lucasarts games, and been very successful. And demonstrated you don't need verbs in the game.
I've had a similar experience where I'd describe meditation as a high priority filter for the messages in my brain's queue.
I wonder if this isn't more an effect of the poorly engineered BART still taking as long or longer than cars in most situations vs the specific location of the jobs.
IIRC Max now works at Apple and is responsible for Swift's package manager.
Tangentially related - it's a f#cking shame and tragedy that Disney pulled MI1 and MI2 from Apple Store. Those are fantastic remakes of the original.
Except that the impartiality of a biased monoculture made up of human beings will not actually be impartial. But it strongly believe that it is impartial and be resistant to any change.
A significant part of the agile process is that meeting the spec isn't the goal, being accepted by the customer is. Your description sounds like there were no sprint reviews to get customer feedback, or it was ignored. So you're arguing that a significant problem with agile is that if you skip a fundamental piece, it results in bad outcomes?
The title should say "conspiracy theory". "Conspiracy" is not synonymous.
You can't profitably mine Bitcoin with GPUs. It has been this way for 3-4 years.
I get the same thing, try to recall a German word and a French word pops up. Interestingly it also happens with BSL (a sign language), I try and recall a word and the sign pops up; I'm not that accomplished in any language other than English, perhaps that's related but it struck me that words with the same/similar meanings across languages must get stored "together" (spatially, logically, whatever) some how.
I forgot to mention, Io also supports Lua-like coroutines. It's an incredibly powerful language, mixing Smalltalk, Self and some Lisp in a non-image-based, easy to use package, accessible to "normal programmers". I would really, really like to see it developed again... and used, even if just a bit. I guess I'm repeating myself here, so I'll stop.
Not only that; in response controversy arising from the 2009 essay he explicitly stated that "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us."

See addendum to the essay at bottom:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Lazy editing by the NYT.
What about search, cab you quit Google?
Thanks, TIL about memory banking!
Like any organization, big or small. You will always have people with more influence and visibility at the top.

Remember that the term Illuminati stems from the Latin word "illuminatus" which means "enlightened". I don't believe when people mention the Illuminati today that they're referring to the same Bavarian Illuminati historians reference but rather a new generation of the "enlightened". If pay close attention you're starting to see this today in tech as some of the industry veterans start to get closer with politicians and the Government through lobbying and advisory roles. The Illuminati concept often falls into the old "Us vs. The Man" mentality. Zuckerberg went through the same issues with privacy and now he's positioned to be a Global Leader.

Hate to break it, but the Illuminati in some form does exist through various social clubs and organizations. I'd say it's not as direct as people position it but those groups definitely have an influence on world events and the future of our everyday lives.
This comment is actually more insightful then I would like to admit. Maybe we should be using forms of repetition more explicitly.
Institutional incompetence or some stupid "Disney Vault"-like reason?
> My ability to live in a green way is more or less irrelevant to the planet

I noticed something one day. I had recently built a home gym and gave some friends a tour of it.

The next week I hear that they're now working out and going to their local gym.

That moment made me realize the positive effect our actions can have on others.

It'll be the same with living green. Just by doing it, you are convincing other people that it's possible and that they should give it a try.

My home is now 100% powered by solar (just got the Tesla batteries installed a few days ago). It cost less than a kitchen remodel, will be paid off in 10 years, is 100% off-grid 100% of the year, and we've sacrificed no amenities (still got the A/C going comfortably :) ).

I'm one small fish in the pond, but my house is now a blaring advertisement for a greener future.