skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Multiple images can be used to compute a 3D point cloud. This is computer vision stuff around for many years. The challenge is this is a passive sensor in that the cameras count on light illuminating the scene. So at night; in bright light (that causes images to blow out); shadows; etc; you can have voids. If a person is in that void bad things can happen.

But cameras now cost under a $1 each in volume (thanks smartphones!) so dirt cheap. An imaging based point cloud extraction system main components are therefore cheap. Add a GPU enabled system to process (it's quite compute heavy) and you are set. OpenCV has the algorithms needed.

LiDAR is an active sensor in that the laser "illuminates" the target area. This adds cost but that is coming down quickly. Also as the sensor delivered 3D points (not images) the computational cost with images can be saved; so less CPU/GPU required.

Levandowski is a LiDAR guy. It's what he believes is the best solution for the problem.

Some feel that LiDAR is not a fit either as it doesn't work well in rain/fog/sleet/snow. There was a youtube video showing a self driving car running a test course in clear weather and again in the rain. You would not want to be a pedestrian during the rain test.

In reality this is all engineering dick waving. Prices will come down and the sensor payload will converge.

For full autonomy it is likely that cameras, LiDAR, Radar, and sonar all will be used. They all bring some advantage to the problem that addresses a weakness of one of the other sensor techs.

Oh yeah, and Levandowski is a complete prick. Someone should teach him about IP theft and give him a prison life lesson. He's going to need it.
Using a temp account. I don't think I would have gotten any interviews at the best of the best tech companies without it (I had an engineering BS in another field). I was only 8 classes in. So career wise, it's definitely worth it.

The classes take a lot of time (see https://omscentral.com), but the learning has been a lot of fun. I loved it.
well, you can't start that today right before someone's eyes get burned out. You could have taken that stance in 2000.
Right, but in this case several parties will get out because they are not part of the chain because amazon did not carefully preserve the full chain. Amazon will be liable to the entirely of the chain not just a part because they didn't track the full train on each product.
The author opens the memo explaining that google needs to have a discussion and subsequently starts the discussion.

again critics of the author actually agree with him.

anyone who supports "let's have a discussion" can not support google who the author believes (and seems to have been proven right) does not want a discussion.
I'm glad to see that people are admitting that the memo wasn't a screed after all, and pointing out that Damore brought up some good points that are worth discussing.

But I would like to push back on the idea that it was poorly written.

Is he an expert in these fields? No.

Was his memo completely unassailable? No.

Did he anticipate every possible response? No.

But he was still quite careful about the conclusions he was trying to draw from the research, and a number of scientists from different fields have all defended the research he cites (to be fair, many criticize the research, too).

If his opponents and critics truly value dialogue, they'll show it by actually engaging in dialogue.
It's pseudoscience at best.
Stop being a stupid indie-gamedeveloper
Now extend your attitude to religous belief. All the parallels are there, including believing others are inferior (certainly islam). Should they be done as well?

You are infact imposing a moral belief system. Once upon a time it used to be wrong to not believe in god. Well similarly you are saying the same about gender differences.
These days "free speech" means giving a platform to white nationalists/supremacists, no matter what.

If you're not concerned, you're not paying enough attention. This continues to go bad places very quickly.
Lots of folks seem to think merit, which I'd define as "ability to be successful in a role" is based solely on one metric: their ability to assemble more widgets than the next person.

Through human history a pretty obvious pattern that isn't the case appears very obvious to me. Humans rely heavily on the feels to promote and lift up ideas and the people attached to them.

There's been study after study in neuroscience and psychology concluding that we don't come to our final decision based solely on available facts. Pre-conceived conclusions rule our decision making in day-to-day life.

It's something all these "smart" males raging over this crap would do well to consider. No one really gives a crap that you did well on Google's hiring exam. You're still a disposable cog. You're good at computers. STFU and learn about all the other things out there. Cause just being good at that isn't good enough anymore.

It probably never was, and the whole tilt towards males was riding on cultural rails.

Humans are not machines. Something that is lost on our culture. Certain voices were warning us about this very scenario of being solely concerned with social statuses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

EDIT: Piling on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15020683
> “People really do want to go more often,” Lowe said. “They just don’t like the transaction.”

The transaction would be fine if the website would fuck right off with their fees. It's bullshit to sell a ticket for $11, but then tack on a $3 "convenience" fee.

Also, the Costcos around me sell tickets to Cinetopia, a local theater chain that does reserved seating so you don't have to get to theater early to get a nice seat, but the tickets can't be used for online purchases.
> If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links.

I would have said TVTropes, but the core point is the same.

I remember having to restart my computer, because IE lacked tabs and Windows would let you open so many instances of it that the whole OS ground to a halt.

It's weird to think that now, in the absence of Google, I couldn't find my way from anything to anything else.
Pennsylvania-6-5000 still works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000
I know that you were just doing a tl;dr and not necessarily trying to start a discussion about it, but wow, that seems kinda stupid to be coming out of someone who is ostensibly fairly intelligent.

A 3D point cloud is great, but with the raw computing power we have these days, image processing should be pretty reliable, at least until LIDAR becomes more. . .well, reliable and affordable.

Doesn't the HoloLens just use an IR camera to map its environment in real time?
>When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?

That is a result of affirmative action, not of the memo. Shooting the messenger, if you will.
> in as conciliatory manner as it could be written

Strongly disagree. I think emphasis is a really big deal here. Here's a key line from the memo:

> Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

This runs right into the Jon Snow line, "everything before the word 'but' is horse____." It comes across that the author doesn't think workplace bias is as important as [other stuff], or maybe that he doesn't think it's important at all, which is understandably hurtful to tons of people. Maybe that's an uncharitable reading, but can you really write about something like this and ask your readers to be unusually charitable to you?
Right on the nose. And in fact, the proportion of women in computer science was tracking with other sciences until the mid-eighties, when it started to dive, while women's representation in other sciences continued to climb.
One of the more glaringly inconsistent observations with Damore's claims.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
This issue is much hairier because discrimination in the work place can be criminal for companies, and employees are representatives of their employers. Whether or not he crossed the line, he was close enough that he got the axe.
You are 100% correct, that was an incorrect argument to make. I guess that was the whole point of the article too, so I really got that one wrong. It is important to recognize the incredible amount of money and social benefit going into and out of libraries, and I don't think they should be so quickly discounted just because it is 2017 and we have the internet.
That is what you have to do to start a business: take large risks. Many businesses fail like this and the entrepreneur loses a lot. It is common for someone running a small business to have to work a night job at a gas station or some such job because after paying the bills there isn't enough left to pay himself.
What troubles me is how easily this community, who typically values employer discretion in how they run their businesses, turns into labor-protection lefties when someone gets canned for crapping on half the workforce.
One might consider domains to be personal property, in that they exist only as a mapping on servers owned by people. On the other hand, registrars collect rent from them, so one could consider them private property. So I am not sure if I am in favour of domain names being considered property of any single person or not.
Don't know where, certainly not in the memo.
I built a lot of the new system at Stripe: the old system would set a flag that was globally accessible inside of an API request. This meant that it was impossible to scope down which changes were relevant to which API methods or resources. Now we can statically introspect into changes.

Additionally, devs would need to specify what their changes were independent of where they made the change, which meant that our API reference (which can display warning flags next to changed fields) was missing changes. With the new system we can enforce that the change being made is properly documented, since we know that it's encapsulated inside of the change class itself.
He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.
An advertising company cannot lean left by construction.
I am saying that they shouldn't have been so pissed off. The bar shouldn't be so low for defining a hostile workplace. Anyone could then get an intolerant mob together and get someone fired for expressing themselves.
Damore isn't a conservative either by any stretch of the imagination. He's a liberal that wandered into some conservative ideas. FWIW I don't think any amount of proficient writing or research is going to yield a different response.
Thanks!

Though couldn't you associate data with your OCaml modules, too?
Macbook Pro 2016: Up/Down arrow keys stop registering presses
He did, a month or more before the fiasco.
Yep, the vast majority of things in this article that the interviewees said they "disagree with" are things the author never said.
To be fair, a counterfeit that ruins your sight and a counterfeit phone case are a bit different are they not?
One of the women said:

> I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”

She goes on to say that people will likely misapply the ideas and judge her. It seems a lot of detractors think Damore should have known better and he takes responsibility for how his ideas affect people.

Another says:

> I don’t really see how it’s useful to have a discussion of general group traits in a work setting. Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?

Again, she's not really disagreeing with Damore in this snippet. She's saying the ideas themselves are counterproductive and shouldn't be discussed.
I'm not sure which world people live in where men are not expected to defend their ideas against the great misunderstanding masses who don't accept them on pronouncement, but it sounds lovely. Can I move there?
I guess that's because of Tesla's advantage in vertical integration -- they control the entire stack unlike Waymo or Uber who have to retrofit their gear into specific car models.

Tesla's tech is generally considered weaker but Musk could still catch up and overtake by playing the "worse is better" card.
Dummies for Dummies, how 'DOS for Dummies' came to be
First year BMW i3 recognizes Spotify and others just fine on current relase iOS and earlier as well, I think.

I'd conjecture it's a matter of how thoroughly apps got debugged by the vendors.
More likely your female teammates are creating a hostile work environment by being unable to handle minor ideological disagreement.

Or even more likely, you have misinterpreted them and are unaware that they were not shaken or seriously disturbed in any way.

Edit: edited to remove the personal attack while still keeping the meaning.
Yah. It's weird that de Boer argues selection bias is in play in SAT participation between MS (3%) and CT (88%) when 100% of MS high schoolers take the ACT. That seems to be what's happening here: the kids in MS taking the SAT in addition to the ACT are the ones aiming for elite schools.
I have been living in SV for many years. There is very little crime, not sure what you are talking about. Even areas that were historically high crime (EPA and Oakland) are rapidly gentrifying that there will be no crime in the next 5 years.
Well, see if the get rich scheme worked, we'd all be doing it.
Why don't you reread that article?

>The sloppy scientist says, "on average, across populations, left to its own devices, this group is [not as skilled] [neurotic] [hard to work with] [not as smart] [not as strong] [slower]" etc. They make assumptions without sufficient data, and the rigor is missing.

Here's the line:
>The first problem is that human beings aren't averages, they're individuals.

His core argument was that there are biological reasons why women are under-represented in technology and that the initiatives taken by Google to reach out to females were illegal and discriminatory. He attempted to use science to justify his beliefs. That would lead many women, who already are self-conscience about their position, into wondering if they are present to their own merit, or because Google is trying to fill a quota.
Tell me you have a paper on that. At least there would be a scientific basis for mandating Unconscious Bias retraining.
Hack Any Social MediaFacebook..Gmail..Yahoo..Instagram ETC
I think this has been talked about multiple times over - Damore did not have a line that states that women and/or minorities are bad engineers.

He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities.

I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers.

Still, it's true that he never said that...
Ask HN: What is the best book you've read about china
In relation to current tech developments, evolution of the economy, etc.
That's some seriously cool debugging.
/r/abandonedweb. It's also ironically now a victim of time.
I actually know people who are still working on refutational evidence bombs like that. The problem is that actually finding sources and addressing his points in all their "but I really meant" vagueness is a huge piece of work, and people have day jobs. In the meantime, his shit is out there. If it's ok for anyone to read and agree with it without going through to confirm his "facts" and "citations" on the spot, then it's equally ok to read and disagree with it.
A common criticism by each four of the female engineers is how the memo effected them in their job and how they had to prove themselves afterward. This strongly reminds me of about a case a year ago when a kindergarten teacher was tried and charged for rape against several children. After a lot of media attention, many male teachers all over the nation reported to constantly having prove to parents and fellow female teachers that just because they are male and chosen that profession it doesn't mean that they are criminals or are higher risk employees. Not only that, but many school implemented procedures that limited what male teacher were allowed to do, furthering pushing a second class status on them. Many also received threats of violence, and since both the left, the feminist movement, and the right fanned the flame against male teachers, many just gave up and left the profession. If memory is right, one news article ended with "I just wish I could go to work and do my job, but that is no longer possible".

I would very much like to see a discussion on how to solve this kind of problem.
Yes and no. IAM is a global service homed out of us-east-1.
You don't get to determine how people receive a message. You can only take care to send it in a way that would be received well. If everyone in a large and diverse group receives the message poorly, the problem is not with the group.

If you're worried about an angry mob firing you, start communicating with care.
"He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups."

-> so an employee accuses a company of illegal behavior, the company denies it, and that's it? It proves the company is not doing it? No need for investigating or anything?

Elizabeth Holmes and Travis are probably thinking: damn, I wish people thought like that for me too!
I would say that women already know that affirmative action hiring practices negatively affect people's perception of the abilities of those who benefit from them. And even if they didn't know, the hostile work environment[1] would already exist in the stereotypes women overcome, so publishing the memo would only give the opportunity to fight it more effectively for women who do not realize they face discrimination.

[1] I am not certain the extent to which this stereotype exists, so I am not sure it rises to the level of making the work environment "hostile", but I see that it could be the case.
Maybe the takeaway is: you shouldn't write "memos" that generate a lot of noise and lost productivity in your work environment and affect your company's external image. If you have political points you want to make, go find a group of like-minded individuals and discuss with them first.
They also have insane tax control. If you've been in your house for decades you pay a far lower tax rate than your neighbors. There are too many people without skin in the housing market game, we should get rid of both Proposition 13 and rent control and let everyone feel the pain of what happens when you don't build enough houses.
Credit where due, AWS is getting s lot better at that.
In his Jordan Peterson interview he talks about it quite extensively.
> At the end of the day, though, I don't think most Go programs can be optimized to run as fast as their Rust equivalents (without dropping into asm, at least)

To be clear, I meant programs that don't rely on things like concurrency or networking. For example, I think editing binary blobs (like images) would be just as fast as Rust, if I remember some of the research I did correctly. I don't have any sources on that, and it was a while back, so it's kinda irrelevant, I guess.
From outside, there's no fundamental difference between a good argument and a persuasive one, even though they're ideally orthogonal. If there's an argument that seems good, and you don't understand why people don't accept it, the delivery is the simplest (or perhaps just least well understood) thing to update.
So did you end up leaving the NYC area? Where did you go, roughly speaking.
And that's exactly where he should have stopped. If he did not like the result, he should have resigned in a much less public manner.
This interview is literally a criticism that says very little about his style of writing. When they talk about "how" he approached this subject, it has to do with overall tone and the medium of delivery, not the nuances of his writing style.

> If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing words that would have inspired debate rather than hostility.

That's it. He didn't talk to a single woman at Google about this manifesto before spreading it like gospel. All he had to do was talk to other people.
So if I say "the average women is shorter than the average man", am I now liable for being fired for creating a hostile environment for my female coworkers?

That leap of logic - taking a general statement and interpreting it as a personal attack - strikes me as something I'd read in Dilbert. It strikes me as a justification for the outrage people want to feel.

It's an excuse; nothing more.
I'd like to think it's everyone seeing what they want to see in it, but that's not really a fair description.

The writing's not ideal, but truly if opponents can read even this and frame it as "women have inferior genes," then this is a discussion that can't be had. There is no way to make the case that sexism and oppression are not the only causes for inequal representations in tech that will not be an "anti-diversity" position that makes some coworkers uncomfortable.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait to HN. That's vandalism if not arson, and ideological battle is not what this site is for.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15022166 and marked it off-topic.
I'm not talking about a woman having to prove her technical ability to her male coworkers at work because of their prejudices. I know that that's bullshit and I'm sorry they have to do so.

I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way. You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them (or what you think are the same points you've always been talking about, but I think Damore's comments on each gender's preference and pressures for picking careers had something worth discussing). What he said had at least some spark of originality and insight, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did. Consider, would we be talking about the memo if it were about how he thought Sundar Pichai was a lizard man?

Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle. They kicked him out of Google and doubled down on their diversity initiatives/echo chamber. We should be able to talk about his arguments honestly and rationally without falling back on gendered reasons at this point at least.
I'll just refer to the women in the article:

> Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?
Consider these two simulators, if you want to try the examples in the paper:

1. https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/

This is IBM Quantum experience. Click on "experiment" to start. It has a nice tutorial.

2. http://algassert.com/quirk

I like this one much better, because you can see the internal state of the machine at any moment. And it has much more options and is much faster.