skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity.

> The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap.

I'm inferring that instead of "lip service", the technology sector should "control" news and ideology.

> The future implications of a couple of companies’ having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt.

This concerns me, not because Google isn't on "my side". It concerns me because I don't think it's healthy for anyone to have this sort of invisible influence.

> By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future.

Right. But the answer isn't to pick a better authority to win fights for "our side". The answer is to give individuals freedom (in practice, not just in theory) to stay away from bullies and fools. Even if you set up perfect rules and systems, eventually someone you think is foolish and/or dangerous will be in charge: Thiel, Pichai, Jobs, Gates, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Maduro, Castro, Kim, Gaddafi, and the list goes on. You may not mind some of them, but everyone would be at least dismayed by some of them.

The author ends up on the path to this conclusion, that freedom of choice is essential, but doesn't really lay it out clearly. There's is some praise of EU's data privacy laws (conveniently leaving out "right to be forgotten" rules), but it seems to me that the goal for the author is more government control over technology, not necessarily true freedom for the individual. How many of the above leaders would you trust with your data?
"the extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron"

Thiel either opposes capitalist democracy, or regrets the franchisement of women. (Edit: Or both.) Reading those words otherwise is, IMO, not charitable but delusional.

---

Having said that, the impression I get is that Thiel opposes democracy, rather than specifically democracy for women. He probably regrets extending the franchise to women not because they are women but simply because he regrets extending the franchise at all.
Not a Googler, and I deleted a couple Google accounts I had several years ago due to concerns about privacy.

If we met and interacted regularly, I suppose I could learn to trust you. Let's assume we get along and you are a nice person, which is likely true. However what you are asking of us only scratches the surface.

You are asking if we trust you, and the handful of co-workers you have interacted with. Even if we accept this premise, you have to see it as part of an enormously larger picture. Do I trust that you have carefully evaluated the personal integrity of all Google employees with access to user data? Do I trust that you regularly screen all new employees? Of course not, these are preposterous assumptions. But in order to do as you ask, these would have to be true. It's too big an ask.

To replace what Google used to provide, I moved to FastMail for email and mostly self-host the rest. Open Street Maps are excellent where I live, and Duck Duck Go is now "good enough". It's been a good learning opportunity for me and I'm very pleased with the results and with how much more proficient I have become with a variety of new tools. I will never switch back.

I don't hold any resentment towards Google or its employees but I do wonder how they feel about what they do. Do they see it as some noble cause, and not an effort to manipulate users with relevant ads? That's not a very charitable description of what happens at Google, but it does accurately describe how many of us see it.
As an aside,...

"...allows or even encourages dissenting opinion and discussion..."

...framing the discussion here as regarding dissenting opinions after some of what has been reported...

"...Google employees who opposed Mr. Damore found their internal company profile pictures posted on Breitbart, the Verge reported."

...begins to look a bit threadbare.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall...
Another rugged individualist discovers that the living as espoused by Walden is essentially the road to poverty.
The claims of sexism in this article are shaky, at best. A programmer created a memo about how the small proportion of women in programming is likely to be due to biology, Google fired them, and that's somewhow supposed to prove that there's a "toxic bro culture"? A memo, which most professors of the subject matter seem to mostly agree with... which makes its vilification questionable.
> 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.

I have to imagine Sundar was flooded with emails saying "fire him or I quit."

I also imagine there were less-incendiary ways for him to propose his viewpoints. He could have left out his obviously-controversial "facts" (which most people with common sense, I claim, would know were gonna piss people off), or he could have talked directly to HR or his manager or even to Sundar about the diversity policies. The way it played out, he chose probably the most explosive exposition and forum. So Sundar had a right to fire him just on those grounds: not for the opinions expressed, but for the effect of enraging the entire company, and likewise for not having the common sense NOT to piss off all your co-workers. In fact, he did say the firing was for creating a toxic work environment.
That's not the point. An example of someone being hit by a meteorite in her living room doesn't mean that we need to armor living rooms against extra-planetary objects.

I think most police officers (those from sane departments) realize that they are unlikely to be victims of situations like the one depicted here. And police officers who are on edge are that way because of poor training, not because of any actual risk from their career choice.
No they mostly own assets, but they need control over the money supply to ensure they don't lose control of the assets. How would the GFC gone if they did not have control of the money supply?
To paraphrase: 'NYT does not want what's best for us.'
How are you assuming the split would work? The networks would be isolated from each other? That's not how I imagined it at all. When Bell was split up, you could still call people on other networks.

I'm interested in different ways of doing it, but in almost any scenario I think the networks would all be federated. Like email. You would still have all your distant friends, their messages would just originate from a different server than yours, with different corporate ownership. You could live in Japan and use the Central American product if you wanted. Many would switch around, that would be the point... some competition. If any network got too big it would just split again.

Geography would force users under a specific service provider only at the moment of the split. After that it's a market-based free for all again.

There would just be n forks of the Facebook source with n corporations in n regions, and shareholders would get 1/n shares of each stock. I think it would be a boon to both social networking and shareholder value.
You're right, I apologize.

But I still argue the point: the depths that you will suffer seriously from nitrogen narcosis are beyond how deep you could even go on 1 tank + no decompression time.

Once you get to 160 ft you only have a few minutes at that depth, so realistically you couldn't even go deep enough where nitrogen narcosis would be a big problem.

So I still stand by my statement: if you have only 1 tank, and follow your dive computer's guidance, your risk of anything bad happening to you on a dive is slim to none.
A local company that designs embedded hardware and software was looking for a developer last time I talked with them. Email me at com leancoder daniel (reverse and add punctuation).
It's nice to have the Keras front-end for TF - less boilerplate etc.

I don't think there would be a reason why Keras couldn't sit on PyTorch but I can't see any work on this.

Keras is very productive unless you are doing NN research. Also you can also run it using CNTK if you want speed up RNNs which are slower on TF compared with CNTK.
India Launches $2.5M Project for Realtime Water and Air Quality Monitoring
So you're saying that youtube should only ban illegal videos and allow any video that is legal? So youtube should allow porn, gore, etc?

Freedom of speech only says the government can't stop your speech. It doesn't say that private organizations have to provide you a platform. Youtube also has freedom of speech. They have the freedom to filter and compile videos that they like and only show those. It's also not youtube's responsibility to optimize their site for helping the NSA to track terrorists.

If I create a website that allows people to upload videos, it's perfectly fine for me to filter those videos and only show the ones I like. It's my website after all, I am allowed to control what is on it.
Do you know anyone who is a cop?

Let me tell you about my buddy's first week on the job as a police officer in what most would consider a small town with low crime. Keep in mind that prior to this he was a school teacher.

On his second day, a single-car car accident. Three young girls in the car, one had her brains hanging out of her head, one was halfway through the window mangled, bloody and dead, and the third was thrown from the vehicle and was "fucked up pretty bad". He said he could see her ribs where the skin had been torn away. Drunk driver, speeding, no seat belts. Guess who gets to deals with that shit?

A few nights later, a woman calls the police on her husband. He's a vet with PTSD and she tells the cops he took his guns and wanted to kill a cop.

An APB is put out on his car but before the police found it there was a call about a guy walking around in a park with a riffle. So the police surrounded the park and went hunting for the guy. Now my buddy, who a year ago was teaching kids in a prep school is walking through the woods where a trained soldier is looking to kill him. At the same time, 15 police officers are all converging from different vectors and trying not to shoot each other in the confusion.

After searching the woods they find his parked car and surround it. They can see him sitting in the front seat and tell him to put his hands up. He never complies. He never complies because he's already blown his brains out.

My buddy got to see that too. Can you imagine what dealing with this stuff does to your mind?

It gets better. When they get to his wife's house to tell her that her husband is dead she says "Good, how?" Perplexed my buddy said "He shot himself in the head in his car." Her response: "The car? That fucking bastard".

Can you imagine?

I live in a nice place. I had no idea this kind of crap goes on. This didn't even get a mention in the paper.

My point is, you don't know what the police do on a daily basis. And you don't even know how much you don't know.

There are no superheroes out there, but most cops are the closest things we have to them.

You should totally join. It sounds like you'd make it all look easy.
That may summarize the goal of the memo, but it does not adequately summarize the content, which has a large focus on biological differences between the sexes being this Big Factor that is not yet "priced in" to diversity programs. In reality he was probably way, way off on the impact of biology, but he confirmation biased his way forward regardless, then peppered the memo with hedges to offset the backlash.
I'd be very curious about what kind of statistics you have that show a significant decrease in standard of living for $2 lottery tickets.
You aren't supposed to be able to dive at all without a certification. So the term "uncertified divers" makes zero sense.

So, if you're "uncertified" and you somehow managed to get yourself a filled air tank, then my point still stands: you can go down to however deep you want.

And the basic open water certification is not much more than a rubber stamp. Anyone can get it as long as they pay their $100 to PADI or whoever else.
I really appreciate your perspective, and agree that I could grow in my empathy for the harmful aspects of female socialisation. It's admittedly hard for me to not view it as butterflies, rainbows and dance classes, but that's just the "grass is greener" effect from my own experience. (I also had no sisters and didn't observe it directly in my own family.) I support everyone liberating themselves in the way that they need to.

I can totally agree that all of the studies and data that we have are taken from within the culture itself, and so it's pretty much impossible to see the biology through the culture. I often notice myself that biological explanations are used by dominant groups in order to reduce their responsibility, even if they may not be the most scientifically accurate ways of looking at things.
>However, this is only after CFS strikes, it is not the cause for CFS.

In my own case (as with Whitney), the anxiety/depression was definitely not a psychological consequence of having an illness, it was a fundamental part of the illness itself, and would appear with no warning along with the other symptoms (not after them). I can't speak for anyone else, that was just my experience, and it seems to mirror Whitney's illness. (Although mine never became as severe as his).

However depression is not a "cause" for CFS (or anything else), it is just another symptom.

>There needs to be a clear distinction that CFS does not have psychological cause and the current research points that way as well.

I think you have a very simplistic notion of what "psychological" means. Read my parent comment again...
People either don't read, or can't read. They just hear sounds that rhyme with thoughts that make them angry, and then get angry.
To put the quote in context it was in an essay that addressed people leaving countries through seasteading. So I think it's pretty much in evidence his view is not to deny people the right to vote, but to allow departure from societies one radically disagrees with for new ones.
And yet it is from the Agile mantras that I learned how to keep meetings ruthlessly short. "What did you do, what will you do, what's blockng you."
The economy is much larger today than back in the 1940s. My memory is something like 40% of the US economy was devoted to the war effort in WWII, while it would have been a couple of percent at most for the Iraq war.
> How can you take away someone's freedom of speech?

Nobody is taking away your freedom of speech by deleting your video.

Nobody is mandated to provide you with a vehicle or medium for your speech.
> I have to imagine Sundar was flooded with emails saying "fire him or I quit."

In a company as large and diverse as Google, there will always be people like that during any public outrage. What's telling is that Google gave in to the desires of that particular kind of person. The fired Googler raised his viewpoint in an internal forum designed for that kind of conversation in a respectable manner and with citations. The fact that doing so enraged the entire company tells of a culture that is unable or unwilling to question itself. In such a defensive culture, doing something "enraging" is required to expose the cultural bubble.
What I'm not clear about is how BC plan to overcome American cities tendency to sprawl. It seems there's a huge risk of building tunnels at enormous expense which travel between places where people, at some indefinite point in the not too distant future, no longer really travel to.

Either that, or you build tunnels in highly concentrated places like Manhattan that just act as a supplement to existing metro networks. What am I missing here?
I don't understand how you can write an article like this without any mention to the gold standard.

With a floating Pound the problem of financing disappear as happened later in the Second World War. Note that they would be forced to tax heavily and emit bonds in order to retire money from the economy and avoid inflation, but it would not be a problem of 'where to get the money'.

In times of war, the veil disappear and it becomes clear that the important thing is how much the economy can really produce, not how much money the country has.
Quote it.
You can strike of "biased mono" and your statement is more generally true. The impartiality of Google search results is always going to be in question so long as there are humans in the loop.

But... this has been recognized by Google's search team since day 1. It's not a new problem. Diversity issues did not suddenly introduce the question of bias into Google's search quality team. Though perhaps it's the first time many people outside Google have recognized the issue of potential bias.
Search results by definition are quite biased - it's returning an ordered list not an unordered set. Googlers' personal biases can and do enter into those results, often in a subtle way where they feel they are being (from their perspective) unbiased. It's an automated system but it's still written by subjective humans.

I agree that every Googler will tell you that impartiality of search results is an overriding priority. It's the crucial tenet underpinning the entire edifice.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" by Sidney Dekker - it covers these points with examples. [0]

Another note, I wondered what the root cause of the financial meltdown was for a number of years, but looking at it from this point of view, it's obvious that a number of things have to go wrong simultaneously; but it is not obvious beforehand which failed elements, broken processes, and bypassed limits lead to catastrophe.

For your own business/life, think about things that you live with that you know are not in a good place. Add one more problem and who knows what gives.

This is not intended to scare or depress, but maybe have some compassion when you hear about someone else's failure.

0 https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
Maybe, like many others, the sales didn't justify the cost of constantly fixing the apps just to stay in the Red Queen's race of yearly iOS update breakage.
Tooth and Tail has this style http://www.toothandtailgame.com/
A few problems with the customer feedback thing:

- the person assigned to you as voice of customer does not use the product
- the person doesn't have time to engage with the dev team
- the person doesn't care

Over the years I have seen exactly one product owner who could give useful feedback. All the others in the end had no idea what they were after.
That's the way it always used to be - for example, many americans still pay a small fee to AOL.

But you can just move it to any other hoster.
2 fluently (French and English), and a barbarism of italian
That's the problem, you aren't going to convince any important amount of people; neither is me or everyone else who thinks the same way; so then we should focus into a more long-term solution, meaning kids, or more specifically: schools. Every school (middle and high) should have at least 1 daily hour about how we are destroying the planet and how to stop its destruction; with less focus on "love the trees" and more focus on "we would die if the planet didn't have trees; so take care of them", and the chemical composition of non-renewable compounds and its practical effects over health, drought, etc.

But this is not going to start with public schools, because that would mean convincing policymakers and we established that doesn't work well; so if its starts somewhere its going to be private schools; funded by people interested in making the world greener.
“We’re building the cars for the future with the work process of the past.” - Tesla employee

Most accidents in manufacturing plants come from repetitive tasks which carry some small degree of risk each time they're done. Loading a stamping machine is the classic example. Those have to be engineered out of the production process. It's about reach limitations and pinch points and guarding, not "safety awareness". It's about finding the places where a simple error once in every million times results in someone losing a finger.

Someone using a machine might do a few thousand cycles in a shift. A million in a year. A "one in a million" accident can be an annual occurrence for each employee. This is why production processes have to be made much safer than one might expect. It's risk times time that gets you.

Tesla is new at this stuff. It takes a while to find all the sharp points in a factory and fix them. It also usually takes outside pressure from a union or OSHA.
What if "every Googler" shares the same blind spots? Even if only one blind spot is shared, how does that allow them to root it out? What processes does Google use to gauge impartiality? Any?
Nod. So then perhaps this is an extension of what we've seen from college campuses in the last couple of years, with undergrads demanding teachers be fired for expressing (usually quite sane) opinions and policies.
You are constructing normative statements out of Thiel's descriptive one.
This is one thing that frustrates me about AI. I can data pre-process all day every day, I've been writing ETLs and data warehouses for years. But what am I supposed to preprocess it to? What is the ideal shape of the data?

A lot of courses gloss over this. The dedicate a whole section to cleaning data and then skip straight to ML with datasets already made. Or slightly better, they make you pre-process the data but tell you exactly what columns you need not why. So when you have a new project unless it is near identical to the example in the course you may not know what to do.
Isn't that true of any capital expenditure? You make a model, cross your fingers, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but you make it up on the margin.
Yup, floppy, squishy, and things variable in type - nearly all of the variation in vehicles is in the trim, not the body.
One example right off the top of my head: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-jobs-death-apple...

You'll find dozens, hundreds, or thousands more if you choose to look for them.
There's been some research that suggests neighbours with solar is a big predictor for who gets solar next, which backs this up.

And in general, the theory of "social proof" suggests people like to follow the crowd in lots of ways.
There have been numerous articles pointing out the similarities between the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise and Monkey Island. Perhaps they felt they didn't benefit from the comparison.
I didn't know the concept, looked it up, and it doesn't seems that I do
I find the documentation daunting but I had assumed that was because I didn't really understand how AI works and that as my understanding grew the docs would start to make more sense.
The observable universe is very large. It would be easy to miss all the action.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thimbleweedpark/thimble...

edit: found in "Final Hours!" Blog post from Dec 17, 2014
>those massive parking lots in faraway BART stations went underutilized

Have you been to a BART parking lot recently during a weekday morning? Even the stops furthest out on the PBP line have nearly completely full lots.
Using four skills in one hero is similar to using 20 skills across 5 heroes. It's not communication, just an extension of a single bot. (It's like a single player micro'ing all 5 bots.)
Interesting, will check out that video. And good question. I've always wondered why smaller islands (and some big ones like Greenland or Iceland) are called islands, but even large ones such as the continents are not. After all, they are all surrounded by water.