skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i think the point is that all react-likes were (with high probability) infringing on at least one of facebook's patents. People were free to move to vue or whatever, but licensing wouldn't have mattered because they would still have been infringing on a software patent that didn't belong to them and that they hadn't licensed.

the closest comparison i can think of is like the mp3 patent situation. Up until this year you were free to use LAME non-commercially even though its technology was covered by patents held by fraunhoffer & thomson.

even though vue's api is different from react's in lots of significant ways, it's not really clear that vue doesn't infringe on some of facebook's patents anyway (at least i don't know what the patents are) but the impression you get from reading every single post by an ex-fb (or current) employee is that using other react-like library put you in a similar legal situation as commercial users of LAME: while it was highly unlikely that facebook would take any action against your hackathon heroku app, it was never clear that any of those libraries (or their users) were free of actual risk. At least users of react were assured they weren't going to be sued regarding any of those vdom patents held by facebook.
Real question: having seen that many good engineers are hesitant to work at a company with very limited diversity, we have endeavored to increase diversity by hiring qualified junior engineers from less represented groups. Is this acceptable?

These are completely qualified folks, for the job of junior engineer. We purposely, from the category of all qualified junior applicants, hired those that also were from less represented groups.

Is this perceived (by “you”, I suppose) as “acceptable”?
Interesting. Do you mean for functions to call each other (so that it’s sub-ms) or for some other reason?
This is what the Go 1 Promise has to say about operating systems. They very specifically call that out as an area where they do not guarantee compatibility.

https://golang.org/doc/go1compat#operating_systems
But he wasn't asking questions. The document wasn't an invitation to explain where he was mistaken. By all accounts he was given feedback on his ideas before the final memo went out. In the very text he says that opposition to these ideas demonstrates bias and he therefore dismisses the very idea of being wrong.

This wasn't some intellectual debate.
I'll grant you that is somewhat true. The manager should get the hell out of the way and help his team be successful. That's the goal. Also, figure out the needs of your team members. Maybe one of them is a little too sensitive about code review comments. Or doesn't make accurate estimates of their work. Help them to address these issues so they can be more productive and more successful. Similarly, figure out what your boss needs from your team, and work to deliver that. Being a manager ain't so hard, unlike grammEr.
I hate those chat popups so much. There are better and worse implementations, but mainly the best ones are the least obtrusive, and the absolute best are not having these at all. Even if I did want to contact the company, this is not how I'd do it, as there are no guarantees made about who will see the message, how it will be handled, etc. (email with a ticketing, or some other form where I'm clearly submitting something and a process exists to handle it, sure.)

Still not as bad as surveys ("Yes, your website was fine until you popped up a modal for this survey which broke my interaction...")
My favorite part:

"Men’s higher drive for status

"We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we
see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not
be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

"Status is the primary metric that men are judged on4, pushing many men into these higher
paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men
into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and
dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of
work-related deaths."

I pity those poor men, forced into high-paying, high-status, but unsatisfying jobs like programming, management, coal mining, and garbage collection.
Haha, I've never been interested in the whole vim vs. emacs thing. I just started with vim and a little too invested in it now. It definitely drives me nuts that it loads entire files into memory and that is the one thing that has made me tempted to switch. It rarely affects me but every once in a while when I accidentally open a massive file in vim and have to wait, I dream of emacs. I would use evil mode, OF COURSE :)
There's plenty of work applying RL techniques, it's just not actually useful for building real systems.

It's basically in the same state as the rest of this blog post where it's so horribly sample inefficient you're usually better off with supervised learning if you're paying annotators. Or you're doing REINFORCE for some proxy metric or simulator which you're probably over-fitting and not actually improving your system with.

The Alexa prize is basically the only situation where you're getting anywhere near enough RL rewards to be meaningful, because everywhere else the feedback is rare enough to not be helpful due to the sample inefficiency.

Which is why I disagree with the characterization that it's important. There's a lot of it, and it can squeeze a little bit of performance on whatever dataset you're looking at, but it's had nowhere near the impact of, say, word vectors or (Bi)LSTMs.
> corrupt

Yeah, that's the problem. Are you aware that ketamine is sometimes laced with fentanyl?

https://nowtoronto.com/news/why-is-fentanyl-showing-up-in-st...

Not really something I'd be willing to take the chance on, just to save a few bucks.
Oh, it's 2018, nobody uses React Native anymore.

We're using Weex [1] or NativeScript [2] now.

[1] https://weex.incubator.apache.org/

[2] https://www.nativescript.org/
I'm not old enough to know how cologne and perfume "used" to be, but it certainly works better (and longer) when it binds to oils.

Try using an oil-based soap, using a dab of unscented baby oil on your skin or not showering for a day before using perfumes.
Betternet VPN Premium
https://www.resilio.com/ (formerly bitorrent-sync)?
EDIT: The land isn't owned outright by the residents, but only leased to them.
> Nobody should be fired for speaking out and/or starting a meaningful conversation

Do you also strongly disagree with the concept of at-will employment?

If not, how do you reconcile the concept of at-will employment with this statement?
If someone is parroting a Peter Thiel quote in November of 2017 it's pretty obvious what agenda they are pushing.

Whoa, association by identity proves agenda? Can you get anymore witch-hunt than that? (Or have any less intellectual honesty?) I didn't agree with Peter Thiel's position on Trump, and I met one of his "fellows" and was pretty unimpressed. But those 3 quotes are pretty astute in my opinion. They are also fairly innocuous.

You, and Damore and so many others, are trying to dress up the regressive status quo...

If you can't do any better than name-calling, you don't even deserve a response. In fact, if you think you are impressing anyone outside of your echo-chamber instead of doing the exact opposite, then I'm kind of embarrassed for you.
This was an excellent use of data to convince people of something they probably didn't believe before. (I knew harassment was a thing, but not how cleanly it would be split along gender; I'm used to everyone being a target all the time.)

Although I think "Apparently, people don’t hit on cats, so I was mostly free from harassment for a while" is not actually true on large enough sample sizes, terrifyingly. I follow cat feeds on instagram and see some terrifying comments.
One suggestion.

Listen to an interview with him and here he present his opinions. He is provocative but mostly just an annoying showman. His harshest stance is on islam which given he is gay seems fairly understandable.

Joe Rogan has a good interview with him (which is the one that got him fired from Breibart.)
I read the memo. There is no way that any normal company would have tolerated something like that being posted on work servers. It was far away from views that normal society tolerates.
MLE, then vuong's test against alternatives. The linked paper is just vuong's test against alternatives.
> In other words, in the past choosing React for crucial infrastructure put you in position where even if Facebook infringed on your IP, you could not sue them without losing the legal right to use React

It hardly matters now, but as gets pointed out every time this gets brought up, this is quite false.

You would lose the legal right to use any patents which Facebook might (or might not!) have on React. You did not lose the seperate BSD license on the actual code with grants you your license to "use react".

> Using React no longer increased your vulnerability with respect to IP or lawsuits pertaining to Facebook.

That's highly debatable. If Facebook does have patents on React (and it is believed they do), then using React, or any technology that uses the same underlying technology does, in fact, increase your vulnerability to IP disputes and lawsuits from Facebook. :) The implicit patent grant in the MIT/BSD license will help, but so did the (now removed) explicit patent grant, so it's hardly clear this is a win on net.

The situation has never been as simple as people seem to wish it was. Software patents are an enormous and (so far) unsolved burden on our industry. At least if you're in countries where they are enforcable (and given the nature of the global legal system, probably even if you aren't).
Completely agree. The mantle of _engineer_ is not passed on simply via a job title.

Responsible engineers (i.e., those that I aspire to emulate) seem to spend non-trivial amounts of time predicting and avoiding potential-negative outcomes. They also seem to have a near-total understanding of the processes that impact these outcomes.

If only I could figure out how they _know so darned much_ about everything ...
The letter does bother me and I would have fired him, but I share some sympathy for having this blow up on a world stage. Is there any good timeline on how that happened? I'm pretty sure the leak (not the firing) is what made it national news... Do we know yet how that happened or how it circulated internally before that?
Using postgre, redis, FeathersJS, Nuxtjs, and VueJS. The near real-time updates and sever side rendering is great.
Aye, I second this, got me really pissed off when fellow CS student told me he has ''experience'' in using Iphone extensively, and that counts towards computing.

Makes you wonder what does computing mean to people nowadays.
Didn't the US have an embargo against China? And even when Nixon lifted the embargo, it was only for non-strategic items (which encompassed more than just militarily strategic; factory technology etc. if I understand right).
Can you please point to anywhere in the memo where he claimed that? I am not asking about your interpretation but where he actually claims that women are genentically less suited for engineering.

I hope you realize how important it is to be precise here. The man lost his job for providing feedback as encouraged by HR after he did a diversity course.

Just making claims that isn't backed up about by what he is actually saying isn't very helpful.
It's not just the history of computer science. Damore's essay was based on time-tested pseudo-scientific reasoning, the sort that has been invoked to exclude women in many different fields. When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differences between men and women, and how those differences supposedly were relevant to the practice of law.

Damore is more of the same. Take, for example, his invocation of studies showing that women are more prone to be "neurotic." Aside from the fact that "neurotic" covers an immense range of personality traits--Damore leaves it as an exercise for the reader why that would be a bad thing. Among other things, "neurotic" encompasses "obsessive compulsive" or "anxious." Why isn't that a good trait in a programmer--someone who needs to be constantly on the lookout for the errant buffer overflow? He also invokes the idea that women are less able to handle "stressful" situations. Which explains why nurses--who are literally dealing with life and death every day--are mostly women? It's not that there isn't evidence of differences in personality traits between men and women, it's that all the inferences after "infant boys prefer trucks" is complete handwaving.

Back in the day, people would, with the pretense of science, invoke differences in cranial measurements to explain the economic plight of African Americans. Damore's is just the latest in a long line of pseudo-scientific gibberish. And it blows my mind that so many in the tech community are falling for it. You actually have to be bad at logical reasoning to find Damore's points compelling.
Actually it does. I can buy cheaper food because Palm oil and orangutans die. I'd rather pay extra and leave them alone.
> punished for speaking out

It wasn't merely that he spoke out. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. Saying "women, on average, have more neuroticism" is not how you start a dialog. It's how you start an argument.

Let's not debate whether it was a factual statement, but suffice it to say that "what I said was factual so there's nothing wrong with it!" isn't a defense. There are a million statements that are factual that you don't write down and distribute throughout the whole company.

Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is to build internet services and make money. If I were Google's management, I'd feel justified in firing him for having the poor judgment to approach things in a way that embroiled the whole company in a fight. The lost productivity alone from the distraction must have been costly to the company.

It's possible he was just trying to help, but you don't hire/employ people for good intentions; you do it so they'll be a functioning gear in a bigger machine. If they can't do that, they aren't fulfilling their purpose at the company.
Or they expect you to ask for context.
According to "Multiple chemical sensitivities: A systematic review of provocation studies" (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 2006)[1], perfume sensitivity is largely psycho-somatic. This means that we experience symptoms because we stress about the perfume exposure. Since learning this, I have employed stress-management techniques during perfume exposure and have enjoyed 90% reduction in symptoms.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17137865
> Even if you factor in setting up Makefiles and autoconf and friends, those are nowhere near the complexity of configuring webpack for a SPA, let alone installing everything you need for a functioning stack. We're talking days, weeks, and even months of tedious fighting to get everything setup.

That's an overly rosy view of the past. Makefiles are inscrutable for a newbie. We're talking hours just to figure out tabs versus spaces for indentation. Google launched in 1998 so that was barely Googleable, there was no Stack Overflow (remember expertsexchange.com?). Older C compilers utterly failed at useful error messages on trivial errors like missing semicolons, or closing strings or braces, and 1998 was before Boost, so good luck getting STL Vectors working. These days languages have hashes/dicts available as a built in data structure. If you were lucky in 1998, you had a C string library and no one had to call ::malloc (or worse, ::realloc).

There have always been major component upgrades if you choose to get distracted. Circa 1998... remember that whole mess with 2.2 vs 2.4 Linux kernel? How about upgrading Debian versions was and that fun with incompatible versions of libc? i386 vs x86_64? STL? How about rewriting to use Boost (version 1 came out in '99)? Getting Boost to build in the first place was at least a multi day adventure.

As a newbie, setting something up on a modern stack is actually pretty easy - because that's no longer something to setup by hand. Clone the tutorial repo, grab their docker container or `npm install`, and you're up and running.
If we charitably assume that the entire thing is poorly written then it can mean anything we want!

If you write something that people interpret as sexist due to your poor language and then spend no effort to correct that error.... that's still bad.
As a conservative I share your feeling of alienation, because look at how the right has responded. It's given us Trump which is really gross. I fear we're in a very precarious position both culturally and politically and I wish I had some insight into how to move back towards a place where we can have rational intelligent discussions again. For the meantime I think we'll all be relegated to the "intellectual dark web," a phrase coined by I believe Eric Weinstein, the left-leaning professor who had to resign out of fear for his life after refusing to stay home during "no whites" day at Evergreen college.
Some of the bits in his memo were pseudoscientific bunk, no better than phrenology.

One of the cited studies from the Damore memo was done across 55 countries, and effectively has a P value which is eyebrow-raisingly high. (They used another stats test.) It's definitely an important result, and is acknowledged as such by a big swathe of Psychology academia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
Yep. I jumped in to try to hopefully tone down some of the excitement. I should know better and won’t try again.
It seems to me that the company that makes the software had the perfect right to decide when it does and does not work. No?
>The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today.

Alternatively, that the nature of software work changed.
If they are completely qualified, they should and would be hired by a system that completely ignores gender and race. While the morality of your system is up for debate, what is not up for debate is that your system is mathematically disadvantaged in terms of hiring the best engineers...because your system ignores the vast majority of the hiring pool (presumably white/Indian/east asian [straight?] men). A blind system favors/ignores nobody.
Dupe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16387966
He's arguing "the left" would never say group A has a higher average IQ than group B, regardless of the groups.

That tidbit is a paranthetical in a sentence about the psychology of left vs right. His thrust is an illustration of how ideology and science are conflated.
"that topic itself" refers to the diversity program, not his Google scholar searches.
Every good developer should understand these things, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand them from beginners.

I learned to program in Borland Turbo C on DOS, and later in Visual Studio 97. Both were full-featured IDEs, at least by 90’s standards. I’ve only started to learn Windows internals & system administration on my first job in 2000. If knowing system administration would be a prerequisite, I’m not sure I’d become a professional programmer.
Are licenses retroactive? If I used a version of React that was BSD, deployed it into a bundle.js and never touched it again, did I at one point have an agreement with a BSD + Patents, and now an MIT license?
It's time for BN to suck it up and put signs around the store saying 'Found a book you love here but are choosing to buy it from a competitor? Please use our referral code: xyz".
It is quite obsolete, but we can still use them in modern windows for legacy program support.

As for whether such legacy program exist anymore it is a mystery.
The differences aren't subtle. I'm using the run-of-the-mill definition you might find in a dictionary[1], what other definition could you possibly be using?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intuition
> Nobody should be fired for speaking out and/or starting a meaningful conversation.

Do you not live on the same planet as the rest of us ?

Because it is common, legal, socially popular and frankly the status quo for companies to fire you based on what you say during work time. After all companies are paying you during that time to represent them and their values.

Society actually expects people to be fired based on what they say during work.
No one is asking you to pity them. But if you want to compete with them head to head you better be prepared to do the same.

That's the point.
But none of those other things (ATM, checking account) are protected from fraud when you initiate the transaction either? And it must be said of checks that they are "backed by banks." I agree Zelle should do MUCH more to tell customers that they shouldn't send money to strangers.
Two Chaotic Motion Demos
Your pun was underappreciated.
Prince Rupert's cube
But then it isn't disjoint.
Lets make a distinction in socially destroy. If you found a nazi that worked for someone who knew he was a nazi and was fine with it, his wife was fine with it and all his friends were fine.

In this case how would you socially destroy them beyond pointing out to those around them what they have been hiding?
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible excuse not to do something.
7 Strategies to Avoid Software Growth Zero, AKA Drowning in Maintenance
You shouldn't have replied. You and the other guy are both out of your gourds, and you don't understand how crazy you look.
> Kids these days have something better than get_ch; a mouse!

Had that too. Had full GUIs from tracking mouse movement and writing to the framebuffer.

Our software is more complex, so programming it is.

Let's go with JS, as getting up to basic game design is still fairly simple in it.

Scanning for keycodes is done by a callback, so you need to have a basic idea of scoping, objects, and functions before you can get started. Didn't need any of that in the past, because BASIC's procedural model was dead simple.

Then to draw, you have to either learn about the DOM or the canvas, you can't just POKE and PEEK til it works.

There's nothing wrong with using Python or JS or whatever, but the complexity to get going is much higher than my childhood. For good reasons, but still more complex.
If the taste is good and the price matches the taste quality, I'll be eating fake burgers for sure. Don't forget the destruction of natural habitats and global climate change!
As a user of a recently unlocked Android phone, I just found out that the Netflix app don't even appear on the Google Play store for me anymore.
I'm unimpressed with this kind of posting.
>As a further point of fact, Facebook (and Google; Facebook is not alone here) stalks even people who _can't_ have a Facebook account. For example, children under 13 in the US.

Surely this is illegal, though? One way to get the laws to ban this sort of dragnet commercial surveillance of people would be to appeal to the 'think of the children' argument and ban companies from tracking information about anyone under 13. That would also stop them from tracking information about anyone that hasn't totally confirmed that they're over 13.
They have a well documented history of lobbying, which is what they exist to do. I don't know of any evidence that they interfere in our elections like this Russian government-sponsored org did. Do you have any?

Whether AIPAC should be allowed to lobby without registering as a foreign agent is a different subject; one worth discussing, but not what I asked about. Lobbying is not the same thing as the covert behavior undertaken here.