skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sort of thing worries me for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest one is that it seems like most kinds of successful endeavors require three things:

1. Persistence

2. The means to set aside time for that persistence.

3. Luck

Number 2 is what most people tend to lack. Especially in our current climate, most people are mentally, physically, and financially exhausted by the ostensibly simple act of getting through a day and making sure that their existence is stable for the next month or so.

But let's say that we get to a point where your average person can have 1-3 hours every day to comfortably spend on their dreams. How much of that time would be spent right now on social media or idly flipping through some other form of cheap but nicely-diced and easy-to-digest content?

Probably most of it. But isn't that exactly what people already said about television and video games and stuff? Isn't it possible that that 'wasted' downtime is actually important to peoples' mental health? Maybe, but personally I think that social media has the comparative drawback that instead of relaxing you like other forms of entertainment, it probably makes you more stressed out. The article sure thinks that 'it's different this time.' And that makes for a vicious cycle of uselessness.

But at the same time, I also think that smart devices can be extremely useful - speaking of attention, how great is it to not have to remember things like 'what is the density of steel' or 'what sort of communication protocol does this chip use' while still being able to access that information in under a few seconds? That should be something that anyone can access cheaply and without artificial barriers.

So I guess attention is probably just going to be another commodity with staggering inequality of access. When you think about it, that's really fucked up; a person's mind and body should be the alpha and omega of their unalienable possessions, don't we hold anything sacred? How long until we're paying to turn off Harrison-Bergeron-style rigs?
By analogy: I used to have incredible direction sense. On one of my cross-country drives, a couple decades ago, I made it to my friend's place, having only vaguely consulted at an atlas a couple of times. I lived in New York; she lived in San Diego. (Edit: And I'm specifically including having navigated the local highways and surface streets in that anecdote, not just which Interstates I used.)

Now, I get lost in my own city without using my phone's mapping app.

When we outsource our cognitive capabilities to the exocortex, we lose those capabilities. When we give our children a tool that obviates their need ever to develop those capabilities, we rob them of something essential.
10 Book Recommendations by Tony Robbins
The Law is here (at least according to your link)
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...

The whole thing here emphasis mine:
No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:

(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.

(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.

It seems that Google has to have a specific policy in place for this law to be triggered, which does not seem to be the claim being made.
It's been awhile, but as I recall, people weren't watching football and soap operas everywhere, they couldn't. The modern equivalent is having those to go.

That's not even taking into account addictions and misinformation.
I think a lot of what people get wrong in these predictions is the social element. Dad's telecommuting to work in the study and smoking Lucky Strikes while Mom - aproned and barefoot - cooks in the kitchen, that sort of thing.

What this misses - aside from the basic incorrectness itself - is that shifts in social perception and overall conscientiousness are major drivers of innovation. So, look at the intersection of what's feasible (with improvements in materials, design, miniaturization, understanding of the human body, etc) and what's wanted (convenience in daily life, improvement of self-image, etc) and you can get things like e-cigarettes, self-driving cars, boner pills, hair loss treatment, yadda yadda.
That’s 10,600nmi on a great circle route. Most current and upcoming long range aircraft are around 1000nmi short of that.

(http://www.gcmap.com/ is a good site to find the distance of great circle routes)
I've yet to see someone complain that software engineers don't build engines and are therefore bad at their jobs. Indeed, that'd be a silly argument.

Also, you've completely ignored my first point above. Even if we accept that teaching is the primary responsibility of a "Professor", it does not follow that this teaching manifests primarily as classroom teaching. Advising is teaching, and is the primary form of teaching undertaken by professors at certain research-intensive universities.

Incidentally, there are job titles that describe classroom teachers at research universities -- "instructor" or "teaching professor". The author of this post was not an "instructor" or a "teaching professor". He was an assistant and then associate professor. Classroom teaching was not a majority component of his job.

Luckily for every software engineer out there, historical cruft in the names of job titles is a bad criteria for evaluating job performance.
Thanks a lot hluska!

I'll work on those points. I'll have to work on making the pushup/'raise the roof' detection smarter. Generally I get good results when I face the webcam whilst on the floor such that when I push up some portion of my forehead goes out of view. I do this before clicking start.

My intention isn't to only count pushups with perfect form, as I want it to be useable by all audiences, even if you can only do box push ups.
Sorry I didn't mean instruction. It's the RISC equivalent attribute then?
California has a very high minimum standard for am arbitration agreement to validly cover fair employment claims, including the employer covering all arbitration costs (irrespective of outcome), where they would not have to cover all court costs unless they lost and the employee was awarded costs. Armendariz v. Foundation Health, 99 Cal.Rptr.2d 745 (2000) [0]

I wouldn't be surprised if an employer chose to leave claims to which those rules apply out of the coverage of any arbitration agreement; leaving the employee on the hook for court costs is probably a better discouragement to claims, especially meritless ones, than arbitration is.

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=160495945137091...
Would you please stop posting flamebait to Hacker News, regardless of how right you are? This thread is awful already, but you've managed to make it significantly worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have made many attempts at fasting. I'm skinny as a rake and get very weak without some kind of constant caloric intake. I also get "hangry" and make bad decisions on an empty stomach.

Is this just me? Or is this a thing that everyone has and just works through?
Everyone who wasn’t gentrified out of their home agrees it’s great. An economist might foolishly brush off everyone being priced out of their neighborhoods as simply “externalities” but San Francisco’s politicians thankfully have a more nuanced view of the situation.

And, as ghouse indicates, new housing isn’t subject to rent control so developers make a killing if they get approval.
In the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact [0], the USSR cozied up to the Nazis with a plan for dividing up the countries unfortunate enough to be located in between them. In 1939, the USSR launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Finland.

The question of how Finland should have responded, especially from 1941 on, is a valid topic of discussion, but this discussion must be based on fact, taking into account the context of Soviet aggression and the lack of options available to Finland. Limiting yourself to what was known at the time, what would you have advised Finland to do?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
You've missed the chance to include namespaces on the standard set, but is it too late to reserve un-namespaced annotations for official use?
Yes, so if time of birth is uniformly random (haha) across the final month, then, assuming the flight took, say, half a day, you'd still have to multiply by 0.5/30, so have only ~0.05 expected child births. Still surprising, in other words. Good chance pregnant women were prioritised.
> I fail to see the use of a communications/entertainment device in a classroom

Then you aren't very creative. They could be searching for more context on the lesson, as an easy example.

You wouldn't want to read more about the War of 1812 online if you were in the middle of a fairly tedious and plodding lecture about it?
> don't discuss it at work

Even after attending a work event on that very topic, which specifically asked for feedback and further discussion?

Or should discussion be restricted to only one viewpoint?
This submission title might appear to be spam, but it's not! It's the actual title of a CCC lecture.
It's a much more expensive solution, but as far as the "best" solution, I'll take a cellular equipped Apple Watch + AirPods and a subscription to Apple Music for most workouts.

For swimming, I guess you could use something like this.

https://www.wareable.com/headphones/best-headphones-for-swim...
If they lacked the emotional regulation to restrain themselves then that would be a red flag that disqualifies them.
It's not just "association" as you put it. r/the_donald was singing is his praises. They're a pretty toxic bunch and I've found that I have very little in common with many of them (mostly because I find their views to be <insert any negative adjective>). So when they're the only people I see coming to someone's defense I assume that person said or did something pretty bad.

Mike Cernovich is the same way. He's looking to push a narrative to further his own agenda. An agenda and narrative I find gross and offensive. So he thinks Damore fits into that narrative. That is a not so subtle hint to me that Damore is saying something gross and offensive.

It's not the best way of judging things for sure but I don't think it served me poorly here.
Eh, it's just a way to get your existing CC information to existing payment gateways without having to re-enter it. If you have a problem you would contact the company you're trying to pay or your credit card issuer, not Google. Pretty much like Apple Pay.
> I'm very tired of this "joking" thing. Neo-Nazis (and historical Nazis before them) use jokes to cover their actual, earnest beliefs, and then go "it's just a joke bro" to shield themselves from criticism from those who disagree while gaining earnest support from those who agree. From the Daily Stormer style guide:

So basically your whole argument is that no one is allowed to joke because that's what nazis are doing?

Let me quote his whole tweet:

>The KKK is horrible and I don't support them in any way, but can we
admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. "Grand Wizard"?

There are no shades of gray. This joke isn't even remotely offensive. The only reason why anyone could think otherwise is their prejudice against Damore.
Until you accidentally scroll down a little too much then scroll back up and the text you wanted to read pops up for a second before getting obscured
Are they trying to manage their projects with some kind of AI? Google works in mysterious ways and I don’t understand most of what they do outside of Google search.
> Sometimes the cost of intervention outweigh benefits, sometimes they don't.

+ Sometimes it works for a short period, as the policy reflected the economy at the time of creation, then becomes irrelevant via technology/market reaction to policy/general progress... but yet stays a policy for decades.

The important point is that we rarely ever measures whether it does work or not, and policy tends to have an extremely long shelf-life.

My ideal state would have:

1) a well-staffed multi-partisan agency entirely dedicated to reviewing policy, with a mandate of removing any policy having a net-detrimental effect on society. By launching scientific studies of the effects with subpoena power over other agencies, making policy recommendations, and potentially the power to temporarily suspend regulations until reviewed by congress.

2) require timeframes attached to most policies, forcing future reviews which must factor in measured results (likely from agency mentioned in 1) or face expiry
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Those activities may not make someone right wing, but they're at risk of slamming into the right half of the bulkhead if there's turbulence. When things get heated, it makes them hard to tell apart from people who are awful and also use that kind of rhetoric.
"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

-- Adolf Hitler

Questions?
xkcd: Meltdown and Spectre
If the points are fungible (and they absolutely are) then what is the difference between giving extra points to <people not like x> and giving fewer points to <people like x>. How are they not functionally identical?
Fixing society's ills is not profitable. There is no VC money in it, there is no going public. The fixes required are long, unpaid slogs with little reward at the end other than you made someone's life better.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Haha. No shit.

Another solution by the government interfering with the free market and having the opposite effect as intended.

Who would have guessed /s
Will this work on ios? I’m using wallet and it would be great to continue using it.
Football and Soap Operas are simply not comparable to the kind of addiction the smartphone people are able to build into their products.

Facebook has an army of phds whose only goal is to make sure Facebook’s users spend another few percent of their time on Facebook. And Facebook with its social interaction, and in depth knowledge of each user, can actively drive its users to spend more time on it in ways no other medium has been able to so far.

And it’s not just Facebook. It’s oretty much every tech company, barring maybe Apple.
> Playing fucking candy crush.

Well, that and replying to HN posts about digital distractions...
And this is the crux of the problem with his lawsuit. Political views are not a suspect class in US law afaik.

What Damore may be trying to do is establish a legal understanding that the political discrimination (which definitely happened) was connected to racial discrimination (which would need to be proven in court). If Damore can do that successfully, he should be able to win the lawsuit.

But I don't think it's possible. At least it shouldn't be possible. Like you suggested, companies must be able to discriminate against political behavior at work that is disruptive.

Damore's memo was released in an unruly manner that disrupted Google's bottom line. It also brought down company morale, alienated fellow coworkers, and caused undue internal strife. His resulting unwillingness to help contain the drama demonstrated his lack of allegiance to the company's interest. Behavior like this cannot be protected from termination.
I don't think that software and literature are inherently different, but I do agree that this post tries to stretch this metaphor beyond its limits.

The first 4 of 6 proposed meanings of "unreadable" are some variant of "It's objectively fine but I don't happen to like it". I wonder if his experience is one where one sees a lot of high-quality but foreign-looking source code.

The article says: "By analogy, plenty of people find reading Homer, Shakespeare, or Nabokov difficult and challenging, but we don’t say “Macbeth is unreadable.”"

When I say some code is "unreadable", I'm very much not saying "It's like that Scottish Play". Shakespeare had a reason to create a convoluted plot for his story. He specifically edited it to be like that. Unreadable source code is usually (IME) a historical accident, often caused by multiple programmers on the same work. Give 3 writers a copy of one of Shakespeare's plays and tell them to each, concurrently, add a new character to the story, and you're not going to end up with a play of equal quality as the original.

I'm not sure I could name a significant program in use written by a single author (Redis might be the closest, in spirit), and some have dozens or hundreds, yet the average book on my shelf here has between 1.0 and 1.1 authors. It's not surprising, to me, that the average program is an incoherent mess, compared to the average book.

Perhaps "Literate Programming" is a good idea, but we've been missing the point. What qualifies a work as Literature is not great typesetting and hardbound publishing and complete sentences, but something simpler: single authorship.

"Should we strive to satisfy the Shakespeare for Dummies demographic?"

My understanding (and I admit it's been a while since I've studied Shakespeare) is that Shakespeare was written for the commoner. The study guides I've seen for it are almost entirely spent defining words that haven't been in common use in 100+ years, and the occasional cultural note. (When's the last time you spoke a word that ended in "-'st" or "-eth"?) If you gave me some FORTRAN-IV code I would struggle at first to understand it, as I do with Shakespearean English, not because any of the concepts are hard but simply the dialect is unfamiliar.
I'm sure that there is truth to our minds having problems dealing with the constant barrage of digital pings, but I also hate when the Microsoft/Canada study gets cited.

There are serious methodological problems with that study that lead to the convenient conclusion that humans on average have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. It's a sexy conclusion, but if you think about it for a moment there are so many implied assumptions in that claim. Chief among them is the issue that attention span tends to be heavily task dependent, so what does the average actually mean?

Here's a link to a BBC article that specifically discusses the attention span statistic: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790
Smartphones, like any other technology, is neither bad or good. It just is. It's a tool. You can use it to do good things or you can use it to do bad things. I would tax these corporations and use the money to raise awareness and that's about all we can do.
I watch a fair amount of Microsoft technical videos, and just off the top of my head I can think of 3 people who are very likely to be diversity hires.

Although at the same time and despite being pretty far right on the political spectrum, I think there is some truth to the idea that big companies "should" hire visible minorities over and above those that are fully qualified, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of legitimately qualified people, or that it causes significant harm to product quality.
After your first two paragraphs, you mostly allude to the truths contained in Damore's document.

Could you elaborate a little more about its "ugliness"?
Is it problematic if it's true?
I think I've only seen one person pay with Apple Pay in the last four years. It was at Walgreens.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious but please do tell me HN readers do you use Apple Pay or Android pay at all ? and if you do use it how often every month?
That is a very strange notion of freedom (albeit pervasive). Everybody has the freedom to shoplift but no one has freedom from the consequences of shoplifting.
And presumably once you have those, you're already on the other side of the airtight hatchway and can control the machine directly?
When I was in school, all I wanted to do was read the Sitepoint forums and learn more about HTML / CSS / PHP.

I had one teacher that took me up on my offer to let me use the one class computer when my work was done and that's exactly what I did with it. Then other kids opted into my sweet deal and ended up ruining it by causing too much disturbance around it.

Back then, I always resented the fact that it was more acceptable for me to sleep during class than to read material on the computer. So I ended up sneaking on my home computer after my parents slept and getting 4 hours of sleep each night so that I would then sleep during school.

I would've KILLED to have a smartphone in my pocket.

Now, I'm not sure what the best policy is going to be, here. But I can certainly relate to the injustice of feeling punished for something that doesn't apply to me.

I can certainly understand that a smartphone in the hands of a student will only make distraction more likely. But to take it away completely seems to overestimate the value of being attentive 100% of the time in school.

For example, imagine if you can take out your smartphone when you're done with your work AND you are averaging above a 85% in the class. Maybe something like that would offer best of both worlds.
Basically any diet beyond little studied, highly specialized diets that are often done short term by athletic types (eg keto, paleo). You just won't find good data with such a small, highly self selected population that includes an high amount of exercise.
Physical buttons. With my dedicated media device I can control it with the buttons and leave it in my pocket. When I play music on my phone I have to take it out and look at it to make sure I tap the right part of the screen.

Also a lower replacement price. Someone might want to steal my expensive smart phone, or it might break and make me sad. If I had a $20 dedicated media player, then there's nothing to worry about.
I use android pay whenever possible. I use it multiple times per month. I also use it when available in apps.
Though in economy, I still find the 380 more pleasant, as it's so spacious and calm.

(Yeah, QC's are a must :)
You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative.

Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I only wanted to point it out because this is so often overlooked when it comes to these issues. This is an arena where our cognitive biases are especially pernicious, and any discussion needs to address them.
Rent control is a failed experiment. All it does is force land lords to massively increase rent amounts when someone moves out to account for multi-year market increases.

Basically, if the real market price of an apartment is ~$3,000/mo, but in 5 years it realistically would be $5,000, they will simply list it for $5,000 now, to mitigate the loss.

My mother-in-law is a land lord in Los Angeles (a very fair one at that), and is also about as bleeding heart liberal as you can get. She is a staunch opponent of rent control.
Thanks for your generalization, but I'm actually here for constructive discussion and not personal attacks.

My question is how many kids are actually going to do that? And what justifies them to be the judge of whether what the teacher is discussing is relevant to them or not, given they are 10 years old.
I hate the fact that you need to state "you're a mixed race woman in tech.". I'm not blaming you, I'm blaming the outrage culture instilled in big part by a bigoted academic clique.
I have a credit card with an NFC chip built in. I enjoy swiping my wallet over the payment terminal and mystifying people at stores with what I just did.