skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh I wouldn't jump to conclusions so fast. I actually like them more for firing that guy.

That whole manifesto was wrapped in scientism, using facts selectively to advance the author's viewpoint, with the conclusion being a non-sequitur.

More aggravating however and the reason for why you shouldn't be outraged is that, regardless of any truths mentioned, it's inevitable for such an essay to not cause outrage within the targeted groups. This is because we are only human.

Now think of the company. Google and Apple are the most powerful and rich companies in the world. And one of their employees writes an essay under the pretense that "it's bad for business" and that:

(1) outrages many of their other employees

(2) hurts their public image, no matter what they do next

Of course they fired him. It's unreasonable to expect otherwise. Repeat after me: a company is not a democracy, a company isn't a meritocracy either, a company is property and that property ain't yours, unless it's your company.

Also, you know what's really, really funny?

The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. That smells like a double standard.
How often is that post going to be bandied about as The Final Truth??

1. "Argues for biologically determined sex differences...

Not really. Argues that we can't rule out biologically influenced differences.

2. "fails to understand the current state of research "

Well, there's a whole bunch of researchers who disagree with that.

3. "argues cognitive sex differences influence performance"

Nope. Argues there are differences in preferences that come out at the population level.

3a) "in software engineering, but presents no supporting evidence"

Sort of true. It doesn't present evidence for performance differences, because it doesn't make that claim. It presents evidence for differences in preference, which is that it does claim

4. "fails to acknowledge ways in which sex differences violate the narrative of female inferiority;"

I don't even know what that is supposed to mean.

5. "assumes effective meritocracy"

Nope. See above about preference vs. ability. In fact, does quite the opposite, by assuming preferences and not abilities are often a stronger influence.

6. "makes repugnant attacks on compassion and empathy"

COMPLETELY WRONG. It references a plea for compassion instead of empathy, because empathy leads to bad outcomes, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom:

"Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make." -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29100194-against-empathy

7. "contains hints of racism"

Huh? Where?

8. "paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension"

Huh? Where?

8a. "whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it"

Huh? He says that diversity programs at Google aren't working and he wants to replace them with ones that he thinks have a better chance of working.

9. "ultimately advocates rejecting all morality insofar as it might compromise the interests of a group."

Huh? He thinks the current programs are immoral and ineffective and makes a moral argument for replacing them.

So complete and utter BS.

And of course there are quite a few scientists who completely agree with him:

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU

And more. And unlike here, they don't cite pop-sci books as evidence.
Best Public IT Standard Operating Procedures
dear all,
I am working to standardize SOP into a big pharma firm. I would like to start from some point so to avoid hours of review. Does someone known any public available IT SOP?
Thanks mate! Will try that.
Depending on goodwill or trust which are fleeting, ephemeral and eventually self serving has always led to poor outcomes for humanity, so much so that anyone who asks for 'trust' cannot usually be trusted.

As societies we have learned the hard way the value of checks and balances, accountability, rule of law and consequences to minimize the scope of trust and the arbitrary application of power.

People don't trust Google, they just assume the very fact it exists means it operates within the framework of rule of law and there are consequences for straying so there is an implicit trust in the system like the bread you buy is made legally to certain standards.

But many may not have considered the scope of data collection, its application and privacy implications fully and will only wisen to them when they are consequences they can feel, at which point the loss of trust will be dramatic or are aware and try to work around them.
You're using linux from 1999 and you've problems like this: "I spent two weeks trying to make my ctrl/capslock swap stick and not reset every time the computer slept/resumed."? It's unbelievable.
> "we shouldn't do anything to increase diversity..."

He didn't say that either. In fact, he advocates for more diversity and suggests changes that, at least according to him, should increase diversity without the negatives he's concerned about.
The first result of that search confirms that it's "I couldn't care less."
That quote is what political journalists call a "non-denial denial". Superficially it looks like it refutes the claim "I don't think women should have the right to vote" while actually doing nothing of the sort on close examination.
The latter... To be honest, I thought about contributing - Steve Dekorte, the author, stopped developing the language, but is relatively responsive on GitHub and merges PRs - but I had to stop that side-project just before doing any real work on VM side. I wanted to add destructuring to the language and wanted it to work with operators so that, given suitable definitions of [], ... and <- this:

[a,b,...,z] <- aLongList

would work - you could write destructuring support in pure Io if not for that requirement.

I don't have the time for it right now (edit: and anyway, there's a limit to how much a single person can do), though, so the only thing I can do is to advocate the language and encourage its use. Which I'm trying to do right now :-) I also have a blog post on Io waiting to be published, I'll post it once I resolve the issues with my blog's domain.
What I'm interested in is AMD support, actually, w.r.t. GPU performance.
I've been reading the code for Ultima Underworld for a while. A lot of that is written in C, compiled in an early Borland C++ compiler. The C lib covers a few things; it's got some functions for manipulating EMS, and supports some fancy automatic overlay handling. So certainly the functions in the C library are written in assembly, wrapping calls to int67 and such.

And admittedly, it can be hard to see where the hand-coded assembly ends and the compiled C code begins. There are occasional stylistic clues, but I'm generally spending more time figuring out what something does and why it's written than I am which language each piece was coded in. Most of the file and memory handling seems to be done through calls to the C library in that game.
Conrad Heyer (1749–1856), earliest-born person ever to be photographed
What's scary is that they aren't aligned with your interests.

The actually bad thing is everybody acts like a) they are, and b) they can't and won't ever change.

Chances are, you are not important, and nobody is looking out to make sure they don't crush you.

In this scenario, you are the bug on the interstate which hits a car windshield. "Oh but the humans aren't out to get you, look at this big open space they made for us, what's so bad if the car knows where you are?".
While I think Damore was quite wrong, I do also cringe when I hear most of the soundbites. There are very good reasons to criticize what he said, but an unfair summary kind ruins the whole idea of discourse about the memo.

Damore's writing prowess is maybe not the issue exactly, other than it is a symptom of the lack of clarity of his ideas. Unclear ideas, unclear writing. It's certainly reasonable to conclude from Damore's memo that what he believes is that "women choose (and succeed at) tech jobs at a lower rate than men because on average they have biological characteristics that mean they tend to be more suitable for other kinds of work" ... preference, biology, culture, expectations, it's all one big interconnected system. He's not at all clear about what, given the biology, he thinks the "natural" rate is... unless he thinks it's already about right? So it's not clear what he means, or even if he knows what he means. Taplin could certainly have been more precise in the NYT, but Damore did nothing to control interpretation of his words (nothing, at least, that succeeded).

To me this is like trying to optimize software in the wrong place. Biology is surely a factor somewhere in the chain, but many other things are causing more problems, and in ways that are easier to fix, so we probably shouldn't spend time on the biology thing just yet, because it won't cause much impact overall.
> agencies try to capitalize on the environment of nerdy male engineers by having an unusually high number of attractive women to get a higher response

This seems questionable. All the recruiters I've ever dealt with are over email and phone, and you might not even meet them when you interview on-site (because there may be an on-site recruiter for the interview). I don't see how physical attractiveness comes into it.

I also find that my chance of having a male recruiter or a female recruiter contacting me is about 50/50.
Indeed. Many Boyer Moore implementations implement the skip loop by using memchr. But in practice, it's often faster to forgo Boyer Moore completely and heuristically select the rarest byte in the string you're searching, and then run memchr on that byte. You can even pick the second rarest byte and use that as a quick way to throw out false positives before doing a full string comparison.

(The aforementioned optimization is one of the tricks ripgrep uses that occasionally causes it to be faster than GNU grep. GNU grep uses a traditional Boyer Moore substring search with memchr always applied using the last byte in the pattern.)
> By that I mean, what types of computers were they using for creating NES games? Other 6502-based computers?

At the place I worked in the early '80s [1], which did some games for Mattel for a couple 6502-based systems (Atari 2600 and Commodore VIC-20), we used small PDP-11s running some DEC operating system (I don't remember which one), using in-house written 6502 cross development tools. Each developer had a PDP-11.

Same setup for developing for game systems we worked with that used processors other than the 6502, such as the GI 1610 that was used in the Mattel Intellivision and the next generation successor to the Intellivision we were designing for Mattel.

We're talking old school here--as in you started your work day by toggling in a short boot loader via the front panel switches to get your computer going.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APh_Technological_Consulting
Same experience. I've basically forgotten all my (basic) Arabic by studying (equally basic) French. I've practically lost 100% of my vocabulary because trying to fetch a word in Arabic from my brain always yields the French term, of which I can't get rid thereafter.

Never encountered such a clear demo of how limited and bucket-like my brain is.
I use Keras for machine learning research and find that it works extremely well. The one advantage of PyTorch is more flexible broadcasting, but that introduces other problems.

A major advantage of Keras is that if you’re using a standard training scheme (e.g. training a convolutional neural network for image classification), your research will be entirely focused on either the underlying architecture (that’s easily summarized and serialized), your custom layers (my favorite abstraction for convolutional neural networks), and losses. Keras’ abstractions eliminate stuff like IO that I find extremely distracting.
How does it compare to OMEMO? Here is what the page says about OMEMO (aka Signal Protocol): "It is an incredibly powerful solution but it is reliant on asynchronous communication and is therefore also dependent on the messaging platform — a central server that can become a single point of failure (or metadata collection)." But AFAIK OMEMO works with XMPP even with federation. What are they talking about?

Well, XEP-0384 [1] says users must publish their keys via PEP (personal eventing protocol), but that is to allow sending messages when recipient is offline. And it does not leak more metadata that already leaks during actual message transmission.
[1] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html
From this[1] answer on the IT Security StackExchange site:

> N+1Sec is a similar protocol [to multi-party OTR, which requires participants to be online at all times to renegotiate keying material] with some improvements. Note that these protocols have a lot of algorithmic complexity and tend to scale badly, especially when you add latency into the mix.

It's unclear to me, though I can hardly imagine it being the case, whether this protocol requires all participants to be online at all times. The quoted answer surely sounds like it has that drawback, which is why I never really considered it as an option (leaving the Signal Protocol with "server-side fan-out" as the only good option).

If it does not have that drawback, having another protocol is a great thing, assuming what Wire says is true regarding OpenWhisperSystems trying to get millions from them for implementing a supposedly open source protocol.[2]

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/a/127331/10863

[2] https://medium.com/@wireapp/axolotl-and-proteus-788519b186a7
Italians (of any geographic orientation), the Irish, and "Africans" (Africa is a huge continent, not a country, and people from that continent cannot meaningfully be compared to people from small European countries) are not "high violence subpopulations".
And if I may be so bold to add a fourth reason, gossip has always been a form of social currency. It feels good to be privy to secrets and have information that other people do not have. Gossip on the internet is a supercharged version of this, the best gossip going viral. Couple this with an increased access to information and gossip by the middle and lower class: Old governments were much more able to keep their secrets from the middle and lower class. The media was much more controlled by those in power. Journalists in my country still refuse to write about certain secrets and conspiracies concerning politicians and royalty. But plenty of bloggers do. This reinforces the beliefs in conspiracies, especially if it later turns out to be validated by the old media.
Can someone with ~250k combined compensation empathize enough with an impoverished person in say South East Asia enough to always do right by them? You can mean well but still not be the best person to represent and in many ways control the lifestyles of people greatly separated from yourself.
A little prior to Dunkirk but there is the case of ("Mad") Jack Churchill, the only known member of the British Army to kill someone during WW2 with a longbow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill#France_.281940....
That would be fine. They are not sharing though. They claim to have absolute truths and they tell other people what to do.
LIke to know how this can be done
I have a Quant Trading Platform I need to raise money
pinder321@gmail.com
Great.

Now just implement a client using web technologies and distribute it embedded in a standalone seperate chromium client.
I think Ubuntu switched over to python 3 by default recently.
I think this quote from the article is relevant, too:

to understand how clean eating took hold with such tenacity, it’s necessary first to consider just what a terrifying thing food has become for millions of people in the modern world.

Getting good information on what foods to eat is really, really hard. Everyone has an opinion, and the hard science hasn't quite solidified yet.
Well let's say I take as my axioms all true statements about the Natural numbers. Let's take the Goldbach conjecture. Is it an axiom? No one knows because no one knows if it is true or not.

When you say "small agreed upon set" you are in essence talking about a recursively enumerable set of axioms. A collection of axioms that is "small" enough so that one could easily determine if a statement is an axiom.
I've made the correction in my comment. I knew it was the opinion section, wasn't aware I was giving the wrong impression. Still not sure, but it's a harmless change.

I did feel the person who responded to me was still correct to have high expectations of linguistic precision for a professional author being published by a national organization.
> Looks like Archive.org will be hosting it, but you'll have to go through a library to access it. It's an improvement, but not freeing the books entirely.

How is it prevented that I simply get a book, copy it and give it back?
A good comment.

You don't necessarily have to tax. Saving acts like taxation, and a £10 note is just a permanent zero interest bearer bond.

Ultimately if you can't buy anything (rationing) or do anything (planning) then all you can do is pile up the money as savings.
They're "literally" the same.
As the other search results explain, both forms of the idiom are in common use in English today. It does little good to "correct" people for using a widely understood idiom.

No one is confused about what anyone means when they say "I could care less".

I do sympathize with how you feel about this. I've been in your shoes [1]: several years ago I went through Wikipedia and changed a bunch of templates that used the phrase "due to" to say "because of". You're probably aware of the rules around these, e.g. these were considered correct:

"The flight was late because of bad weather."

"The late flight was due to bad weather."

But never:

"The flight was late due to bad weather."

After I edited the templates, someone reverted my change and asked me, "Mike, have you looked at a dictionary lately?"

Sure enough, "due to" is now common usage and perfectly acceptable where "because of" used to be required by the rules of correct grammar.

You might say my thinking was out of date due to my not keeping up with changes in the English language. But then I realized I could care less which way anyone wrote it.

[1] Of course I have not literally been in your shoes! That's an idiom too, best expressed in the old joke:

"Don't criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and you'll have his shoes."
I'm curious why they patented their research, rather than keeping it hush-hush.
So if I tell you an avalanche is coming to kill you (and its true) is that fear mongering? Does it make me a "fear monguerer" to tell you that "you should run for your life" because well... you should run for your life? Or it's not fear mongering just because its a short term (AKA urgent) danger?

About the brain washing thing; I also think such school should dedicate some hours to produce a more skeptic/rational society, skeptic of authority (religion/goverment et all) and of course skeptic of the schooling itself.

"attack the minds of an entire generation"... as oppose to what? The free minds that we have now that voted for Trump? The free minds that pledge loyalty to a flag every morning but none to humanity? A free mind is the one who understands its world better, even the "fearsome" parts.

By the way asking me to do "inner soul searching" is the lowest kind of ad hominem, because its not even a rational one (e.g you belong to X political party so your opinion doesn't count) but an emotional one (e.g your soul is rotten and therefore you have rotten opinions).
I like and use both PyTorch and TensorFlow. You’re entirely correct that TensorFlow is far more verbose than PyTorch, but Keras remedies this (for many problems). I’d also add that PyTorch has a narrower scope than PyTorch and because of this introduces problems when scaling or distributing (PyTorch’s flexible broadcasting isn’t without trade-offs). Maybe there’ll be a convergence of Caffe 2 and PyTorch to remedy that problem.
Interesting you mention that. A lot of recent focus has gone into support for gamers. There was some effort to augment high end mice by taking a high DPI high sample rate and turning it into a smoother signal, while still being responsive. See here [1] for more details. I intend to keep improving SteadyMouse in this direction as time goes on. Gaming can be very freeing for folks.

[1] https://www.steadymouse.com/gaming/
Thiel is somewhat of an Austro-anarchist, if not fully one like I am. As a matter of fact, he was to speak at PFS 2016 [http://propertyandfreedom.org/2016/01/pfs-2016-annual-meetin...] but cancelled - likely due to PC pressure - but it would have been great to hear him speak.

Anyway, this school of thought espouses that capitalism and democracy are inherently incompatible. Democracy is seen as a slightly longer but sure road towards communism (as Karl Marx himself said [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Marxism]).

The logic here being that, if the criteria by which elected officials get into government is by promising the demos more and more government handouts, then the logical conclusion is that at some point, we'll have transitioned from democracy to communism.

The Austro-anarchists' solution is therefore to nip it in the bud and ensure that society doesn't employ democracy from the onset.
I agree with the stuff about accountability but what kinds of recruiters have you been dealing with?

As a developer, I feel like I'm the one who is rude and not the other way around. These days they're lucky if I even pick up the phone.
Twitter users are revealing the identities of white supremacist protestors
You are arguing that. He doesn't.

What I see argued there is the tendency for women to prefer something like early childhood education or psychology over software engineering.

It has nothing to do with suitability at all.

See also: Why Brilliant Girls Prefer non STEM Subjects[1]

The studies it cites show that women who are good at math (SATs, I think) also have good verbal skills, so they simply have more options. And apparently people of either gender who have both options open to them prefer non-STEM.

That is even an ability difference (whether biological or not is irrelevant, though SAT scores appear to have a strong genetic component) that has nothing to do with women being "less suitable" for STEM and yet fewer women in STEM.

So your logic that any type of argument, even if it's just preferences, has to automatically mean that there is a claim (if hidden) women are less suited is quite simply wrong.

Apart from the mistake pointed out elsewhere of taking a statistical argument about populations that tries to explain population differences (and not individual differences) and turning it into exactly the essentialist argument you find objectionable.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Please don't misunderstand. I'm neither a racist nor a colonialist — nor a nationalist, for that matter. To the extent that I believe in anything, I believe in civility, meritocracy, and Darwinism. The country and civilization my ancestors built is dead, and there's no bringing it back. But we will build something new, something bigger and better and stronger, and instead of beginning with the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...", it will begin with just these four:

"The Know-Nothings were right."
JrGQL, a GraphQL alternative
Nicely parodied in The Thick of It (UK forerunner to Veep).
Yep (from a compilation perspective)