skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This frightening shift away from meritocracy sounds suspiciously like what happens in India. In India, everything from government jobs, admissions to colleges and universities, etc is based on this quota system based on caste, religion, and other subdivisions instead of meritocracy.

The intentions are undoubtedly good. But the actual results? Every government department is horrifically inefficient because a whole lot of people who do not know how to do work land up there due to these quota systems. In many cases, if you fit in a special category, you can basically fail in your university entrance examinations, even not attempt more than one question, get that question wrong, and still get admission.

People regularly riot, often violently, to pressurize the government into declaring their group as minorities so that they can specifically get these benefits.

ISRO and the Army are the only public institutions in India that operate on meritocracy. And they are pretty much the only public institutions held in any regard by the public.

This may have a feel good effect in the short period and some people may feel like they are somehow morally superior. But this will always lead to a whole lot of pain in the long term.
The best part is: by revealing the true "cost" of the free services and slowly starting to curb their behaviors, high-quality paid services and content are becoming more palatable and viable.
So in other words, 99.99% of all modern day programmers.
Maybe it's the wrong thing to get from this, but I'm imagining that in this scenario, in the US, one man's property is in most cases more valuable than another man's existence?
Better words are the ones that aren't exclusively evaluated by humans. These are things on which people can agree there exists an impartial measure of the thing.

What do you propose we replace it with then? I happen to think that the word "merit" is apt to describe what any good software company is looking for in its employees. If an individual brings value to the company, they have merit and should be rewarded for it.

The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?

How is this relevant? If someone is voicing dissent about a culture there's a million barriers they can hide behind instead of facing the allegations ("we're committed to working towards a more diverse and inclusive environment..."). Are we to cower away from any word that can be twisted to justify bad things as well as good things, for fear that people will abuse them?

The word "meritocracy" doesn't seem like a line of code specifying an objective action that is to be taken to solve a problem, it describes a vision of how someone would ideally like their company to operate. How about we just call out bad behavior when we see it and not let it pollute the vision? That's what needs to happen, or we'll be locked in this battle until one political group manages to suppress the others (that, by the way, seem to have the exact same endgoals they do).
802.11g actual max throughput is 22Mbps, assuming you don’t live in an apartment.
You have to explicitly opt-in now.

Perhaps a middle-ground will be centralized batch opt-in services that opt you into collecting for most ad networks and sites.

The requirement not to deny service for people who don't opt-in should prevent that from being used as an end-run around the regulations, but we'll see.
That is correct. They should have just gone the route of taxing more for that revenue.
Glyphosate is also used as a "desiccant" to prepare the crop (talking about crops like grains, corn, beans, but also others) for harvest. You spray a desiccant to either kill or at least harm the crop plants, a little before harvest so that in the subsequent days the plants start to wilt and dry in the field. Then you can harvest a drier crop, need to spend less effort to dry it post-harvest, and a drier crop is less susceptible to spoilage.

Your very purpose is to "desiccate", that is to kill or harm, the plants before harvest. So you don't need to care about concentrations (expect from the point of view of regulations, how much glyphosate residue is allowed in the food products).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation#Glyphosate

Using glyphosate like this is banned in some countries (Switzerland, Nordic Countries come to mind), but it is widely used in most of the world. It has nothing to do with GMOs, it is widely used to desiccate wheat, for example, and there is no GMO wheat anywhere in commercial production.

I am no expert, but I'd guess this is the main source of glyphosate residues in food.
It's strange this has so many points and comments but almost instantly disappeared from the front page of HN.
I’ve been using the Internet since the mid 1990s. It peaked around 1998-2002. It took me awhile to realize what crap it had become. These days, I stick to native apps for Maps, FB, mail, etc., plus websites that look like they’re out of the 1990s (e.g. HN, Westlaw, Google). To the extent I read the news, I get it from subscriptions on my iPad. (Mostly I just wait for my wife to fill me in based on pod casts she listens to.)

Every now and then I’ll wander into the regular Internet for something (e.g. HN links some article). Usually it’s a jarring and deeply unpleasant experience.
For someone who doesn't care about private parts, why are you the first person to bring it up? If you care about delivering success, you should take a moment and think hard about why you feel so strongly about the race/gender aspect, and are not thinking about the probability theory.
It depends on whether evaluating x leads to non-termination. In that case, action(x) should also not terminate.
Actually they're estrogen blockers and slightly increase testosterone. Meat eaters have lower testosterone than vegetarians. This is all found in Dr. Gregor's videos on yt.
Interesting, early on with a 4K monitor on a Mac I was having trouble with kernel panics I wonder if this was the cause.
Robin Hanson on Signaling and Self-Deception
"The word "meritocracy" has no procedurality to it, it solely signals values without providing an effective method of achieving it."

So? Nor do democracy, aristocracy or kakocracy. However they are all useful terms for expressing where the power lies. Hackers are happy to let anyone contribute to the solution, but "f--- your feelings, we've got a job to do here" applies too.
I don't remember anyone running services with offerings similar to e.g. Gmail back then without income from targeted advertising. Back then, my mailbox had 10 MB capacity while Gmail offered 1 GB thanks to the money from advertising.
Standardizing Aspects of Deep Learning
Or as dr. Gregor says, "cut out the middle moo." ;)
Seems like this problem could have easily been solved by putting a diode on the device side.
This was the shocker to me:

> The cost of table saw injuries, to the government and insurers, is greater than the value of the table saw market!

...making it seem like the manufacturers are just taking the profits and dumping the externalities.
So, cables shouldn't have a wire on pin 20.

This means that you could have a dongle (say, a DP-to-VGA converter) that works when plugged into the source, but doesn't work when plugged into a cable and a gender-changer to effectively form an extension cable.

I'd argue, therefore, that extension cables (purpose-built with M-to-F connectors) should wire pin 20, and only M-M cables should omit it.
That's not a bad thing. The general public has never wanted web companies to spy on them, and tech companies have been taking advantage of people's ignorance.

Everybody in the ad world knows it, too, and that's why so many companies are freaking out. They'll never get permission from people to spy on them like they have been. They whined about the "Do not track" header in the same way - they want to hide what they're doing as much as possible.

If asking "customers" to opt-in in to your business model is going to hurt your business, it was a shitty business model in the first place.
Is this sarcastic? Locks get picked and doors smashed by burglars multiple times a day.
> Langs like Rust were lucky to compile to the same IR as a cross-platform C compiler.

Even then, it was a lot of work to be compatible with MSVC. Alex Crichton spent years on it. Not to mention the dozens of man-years of work that folks from Google put into getting it all to work on the clang/LLVM side.
Do you think Google requiring use of my personal info in exchange for free services should be banned for the same reason as duels?

What is that reason exactly? I don't see what the two have in common.
DDG ads are usually terribly irrelevant ("Shop for testicular cancer on Amazon").

Then again: with re-targeting and other "very advanced" techniques, so are other ads I get.

I wish I'd get actually relevant ads. Perhaps a "universal" micro-payment system may make me actually give away money.

Perhaps data-banks will actually happen.

The days of the ad-rush seem to be coming to an end.
Add a pihole into the mix and everything gets even better.
Meanwhile, obvious cryptocurrency-related spam & scams remain.
Well yes, I agree. It's a bit of a toy example, simplistic, but hopefully one we can all relate to.

It does illustrate the issue of using "meritocracy" without anything else. It's like saying "we follow a style guide", and then not providing that style guide. Obviously sub-optimal.

(The example breaks down since providing a style guide is doable, whereas providing a "merit guide" is hard/impossible? In that case, is it better to remove that? I don't know.)
Other 'bullshit jobs' including making trains and toasters and ladders by taking existing components like nuts and bolts and simply welding them together.

I've always wanted to like David Graeber. Superficially, he seems like a smart, rigorous, heterodox left-wing thinker. But his work is intellectually bankrupt more often than not. Brad DeLong has been doing the hard work of breaking down Graeber's facile arguments and incorrect information for years. Here's one blog post to look at if you're curious. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-th...
Just because it's hard to accomplish pure meritocracy doesn't mean we can't strive for it or have it our stated values. It has an advantage that we can reject all efforts which contradicting the principle and could possibly undermine the project.
This is about changing the very nature of how open source projects work for people with radical political views to 'feel included', specifically to have their political views validated.

It is not about improving actual diversity, Mozilla already has those efforts. Mozilla should welcome and support contributions by everyone, I even recognize the systematic barriers that some people face, but I don't think we should be altering how key open source software projects function to affirm the believes of a small but loud group of radicals, particularly when their solutions for diversity don't actually increase diversity, they just increase the power of that loud group.
Not really, sorry.. first we are not feeding everyone. Second, animals take more space and resourced than vegetables.
Mr bean live stream full episode cartoon
Or a chemist who uses exiting molecules. The musician who uses existing notes.
"the sure-thing principle states that a decision maker who would take a certain action if he knew that event E obtained, and also if he knew that the negation of E obtained, should also take that same action if he knows nothing about E."

using "obtain" in it's archaic, old-french, meaning of roughly "succeed". Wikipedia math pages are generally useless for non-experts, but this is a new one!
If your opinion lines up with whatever opinionated tool you use, you won't experience friction and will perceive the tool as aiding your work. It's not rocket surgery.

It was the same thing when Ruby on Rails hit it big; some people swore by it and others detested it. It's like having a car that will only turn left, as long as you need to go left the car is perfect for you.
> Instead of abandoning a meritocracy because it has implementation issues, why don’t they just fix the problems?

Because the small group of people pushing these changes don't want meritocracy, they want power and influence merely for having the correct political opinions.

They rely on the cooperation of well-meaning people who support diversity but don't see it's ploy for control and power.
I can’t tell from the screenshot - if you don’t apply colors to your tasks, are the task items even shorter height or does it always preserve height for the color bars?
GDPR would have been a sensible regulation if it only applied to large companies. With respect to complaints against Facebook and Google, I have no qualms.
> But the OEM, Network don't approve / supply those updates, is Google at fault? (In this case its a non-Google phone running Android)

Great question. I have no idea, and with the GDPR having been looming on the horizon for two years now, is something that would be beneficial (and cost-effective) to spend money on getting quality legal advice.

To anyone who has seen the complaints about startups having to spend $20k on a lawyer to explain the GDPR to them, a small startup won't be facing complicated legal questions like these (and those who insist on doing so, have been given ample warning).

A friend of mine has an online business that involves offering/reselling/managing a client's domain registrations (as part of a package of specialised hosting services). Meaning he can't really get around sharing his clients' information with third parties (registrar, other domain shop, I'm not sure). 25th of May approaching. He reads up on the GDPR, makes some adjustments how or what data he stores (because earlier, you know, it was considered good practice to "store all the things" just-in-case), writes a 3-page license agreement (I suppose he took a boilerplate example and adjusted it to his needs), sends it to his clients to agree, and done. Less than a week's work.
No, because the fines encourage good behavior to avoid them.
lousy wikipedia math culture aside, this is critical bit of logic for Sudoku players :)
I really like his example at the end - step-by-step deep dive into a specific topic. 30 hours of learning, direct links to resources, come out the other end as informed and aware of the topic at hand.

I usually find it difficult to wade through the mountains of possible (often outdated) resources on a topic I'm unfamiliar with - At one point I was thinking it'd be useful to crowdsource those kind of step-by-step guides across a variety of verticals. Kind of like an online class, except pulling from the best up to date blog posts and specific resources from around the internet, instead of relying on a singular POV of the guy who made some videos and called it a course.

Anyone know of anything like that? How do you approach deep diving into unfamiliar spaces?
Ordre public (public policy).
> Trains in the rush hour

Especially given the picture you provide, I think you're talking about intra-urban rail (subway, metro, even suburban commuter).

That's a far cry from a 350-mile, 3-hour inter-city link.

Show me the picture for the London-Edinburgh "rush hour".
Definitely impressed by the design work that went into this report. I'd be super curious to hear from people who design these sorts of communications. Usually we think of a well designed pamphlet for marketing purposes, but clear informative presentation here well exceeds what I've traditionally expected from a government report.
If your argument against the use of "meritocracy" is true, it would apply just as much to "diversity" or "equality", meaning that you are arguing those generically good words should not be used as well. Am I missing something?
It's unclear to me how much of Gmail was made possible due to immediate pocket lining potential, and how much was possible due to their bringing the model of "offer orders of magnitude more service than what the average person will use, and absorb the outliers in the margins" to a web app service.

I don't think Gmail started out with heavy email content harvesting and integrated advertising but I could be misremembering.
Maybe because the EU has no jurisdiction or influence over China?
I'm worried this is nothing more than intellectuals showing pretty severe selection bias.

Take the archetypes listed. There are non famous failures in each. Selecting the successes is a bit of a sleight. Worse, the logic of, "if it isn't working for you, you should try a different method. It is you that is incompatible, not the methods."

I mean, I want to think that Poirot's "little grey cells" are a thing. And I know I have solved problems by thinking about them. The same problems colleagues were busy trying to solve.

I also know my colleagues have probably done more busily solving things than I have thinking about solutions. More, I know they also think. It is not an either or.

So what is to be learned? Keep trying? Change strategies. But stay away from goto statements. There is not true way, but your way is probably wrong. Or at least, you are wrong for that way? :(
A cascading delete is not necessary. You need only to remove personal information, not all information. Now if you are producing an application that only contains personal information like a chat app, then sure, you might need to remove everything.

But often all you need to do is overwrite the name, address, or similar bits of information, and you can then leave the rest of the data intact and set your delete flag.
The lines don't connect across year boundaries- I think there is a bug somewhere..
MinGW doesn't integrate as well with the predominant workflows (toolchains, linking, debugging, etc.) Most Windows desktop apps are compiled using MSVC, so this is important for many people.

Just to name one issue of many, MSVC uses Microsoft's PDB format for debugging instead of GCC's DWARF.
I agree. My point wasn’t that the right to be forgotten is bad or wrong, but that the parent post ironically said “just add a checkbox and you’re good!” about GDPR compliance, and was not just wrong — but $20 million wrong!

Those kind of fines are simply not compatible with low quality advise like “Just add an opt-in checkbox, and you’re good to go for GDPR! What’s the big deal?”.

Overall, I like GDPR a lot (though as a disclaimer, I should say I haven’t read all ~80 pages yet).

Still, I am not as confident as many here that GDPR will have no serious unintended side effects.

Imagine for example if Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. all get hit with huge fines despite genuine best attempts by them to be compliant, after which they decide to cut their losses and exit the EU market entirely. Stock markets could crash globally, a new recession would occur, etc.

I very much doubt anything like that would happen, of course. But until things settle post-GDPR, I don’t think anyone can say for certain how this will economically affect the EU, and the world.
As a start-up, you do what you need to do, and probably skirt the laws in some areas (I do anyway).

We can't get to full compliance, and in the timeframe with the workload we're working with, we didn't send out a message to all of our users asking them to reconfirm that we can email them.

That's just a hassle I don't think is worthwhile at this stage. So, we're risking it. Are we going to get a $4m fine for this. No, did we every implement the cookie law, which because we are an embed would create a brutal UI and result in some of our customers having multiple "accept cookie" messages on a single page? No, we said screw it, it's a stupid law.

If we listened to every stupid law on the books, nobody would have any fun.

BUT, in my opinion, we work within the objective of the law. The law is about protecting users private data. That is a good thing. Due to GPDR, we are taking extra steps to protect user data, and making it easier for users to delete their data. We have had to create Data Processing Agreements for our customers.

Take a look at the law, see what you can implement, understand why the EU has implemented the law as they have, and get as close to legal as you can.

Every start-up is making trade-offs, just because this is a big-bad LAW, does that mean it should get all the attention and that your customers should suffer while you implement.

Weigh the odds and get to work. If this kills a start-up, I suspect it is the start-up gave up or needed to act shady.

This is definitely doable for a one-man start-up with no lawyer.

Just like Terms of Use, take a look at what others are doing, and then copy what works for you and your busy.
Would you seriously, actually ever stop to use Google? They have a gigantic monopoly on so many things.
Never fear, some of the greatest inventions came to inventors later in life. This whole “you need to accomplish early in life” is a trick to demotivate you.
This is mostly false.

The GDPR doesn’t fine small companies that aren’t making a lot of money. The fines also don’t apply fully to startups until they are a certain age, depending on country.

The GDOR doesn’t require you to delete user data that you need. That would be insane, you could obtain a loan and ask to have the record of it deleted if it did. The GDPR does require you to inform people that you keep their data, and it requires you to tell your national how you plan to keep the data safe.

You’re not required to have GDPR legal representation in one man - small companies or startups.

The GDPR is only really a problem if your business model evolves around selling privacy data. I won’t lose any sleep over it being harder to make a new Facebook and I’m looking forward to see what new business models spring up.

I work in the Danish public sector by the way. I have around 500 systems that need to comply, some of these systems run on mainframes and have bits of software that are older than me. I’m not worried, especially not when we haven’t seen a single case in the courts. Until that happens the GDPR is really just a piece of paper because nobody knows exactly how it’ll be interpreted by the legal system.
What happens when a GDPR claim is dismissed by a court? Are the plaintiffs required to compensate the defendants? Can Facebook/Google counter-sue for damages?

What's stopping anyone from randomly filing GDPR claims against every other website? How many such claims can the system handle at any given time before succumbing to years-long queues?
You can’t say that until you see the price. Facebook would cost $20 per year per person. It s up to the users to decide if thats a good price
How does this handle people changing their emails? Can you do the same thing with a cryptographic signing key or something, instead? It seems like this could be implemented in a way where I prove control over the signing key (by signing a challenge, for instance), but I don't have to reveal anything about my identity besides "I have access to this key" if I don't want to.

(If you're worried about not just servers changing but clients changing, and needing to get the key over, there are protocols for efficiently and securely transferring information between client computers, using a very short password that doesn't need to be kept private after the transaction. magic-wormhole implements this sort of thing.)

This may or may not apply to your site, but, in general I don't want other users of a website to be able to PM/email me unless I specifically authorize them to. Requiring that my email is public does not provide me this control. You can do what HN (which doesn't implement PMs) does and let people have an optional public profile, where they can list a way they want to be contacted by other users if they want.
'You have to explicitly opt-in now.'

I'm seeing targeted ads so where did I opt in? I'm not saying I didn't but the fact that I can't recall doing so is a bit of puzzle?
What has caused the sudden spike of Web UI frameworks?