skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their market cap growth is impressive. Did the Trump presidency (and resulting tweet wars) make it relevant again? Very rare for a tech company to come back from the dead like this.
> other than getting music to start playing.

Egg timers too.

But stupidly, Siri only lets me have one simultaneous timer.
I think that rust doesn't have (doesn't want to have) -ffast-math.
Thats cool. Lets start with apprenticeships and see where it goes. OR sponsor a black kid for the coding boot camps. Hey, attend this 6-month boot camp on us and work for us for 3 years. for Free.
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For all of those who claim it might be a pipeline problem, I looked it up and it looks like 4% of engineering degrees are granted (earned? Awarded?) to African Americans

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/aamajors.c...

Ill leave the interpretation up to you
> I see what you're getting at, but I think the reason that suicide is linked with mental illness is because it goes against our very nature as living beings.

So does contraception, yet we don't consider people using it mentally ill.

I only say this to imply that "going against our very nature" isprobably not the main reason we link suicide with mental ilness, not to be disrespectful or anything. My mother killed herself so I am not someone to mock suicidal people.

> If anyone as any counter points I'd love to hear them - but for the most part I think suicide stems from mental instability or an otherwise inevitable physical death (terminal illness, old age, etc).

My mother had been diagnosed as depressed so at least part of society deemed her mentally ill, so the link from that to suicide can be made. However, having dealth with a similar diagnosis myself, and having learned to properly cope with it while staying as far away from psychiatric medication as physically possible I am quite skeptic about mental diagnosis.

On "Lila", Robert Pirsig proposes the completely not medical and just-a-personal-theory idea that, however, resonates a lot with me, that "crazy" is a social thing (you're only crazy if we have 'non-crazy' people to compare yourself against) and that taking such people to anthropologists in the hope of helping them find a culture where they would be a better fit could yield better benefits than psychiatry. Personally, while I did not physically relocate to another place, I severed myself from a big part of society that I found harmful and I have been as good as can be ever since (12+ years now).
which is clearly different to 2k8 meaning 2800.
(or 1k7 meaning either 1700 or 1007...)
I do. I build all my geeky/experimental back end services in .Net Core these days because it's quick and easy and dare I say, fun.
> when really we as a national don't honestly want to see marginalized groups succeed

This sounds like a very big statement and probably something that can be a long post in itself. Would you be able to expound on that?
My experience is that most tech companies are falling all over themselves to hire minorities of all kind and the problem is more with high schools steering black students away from stem and just generally segregating black students in general.

I don’t know how much has changed but when I went to a high school that was at least 30% black and I had 1(!) black student in any of my classes in 4 years. Honors and so-called ‘gifted’ programs have often been used as a way to resegregate supposedly integrated schools.

That kind of bullshit has repercussions for generations. You can’t just say ‘oh my bad’ and expect things to turn around on a dime.
I'm not a teacher, and i'm not running a university, and I have a budget with requirements i've been hired to deliver for clients. How is this even a possibility for me to pursue? I'm not socrates.

I set the job requirements to the absolute minimum of having any relevant anything, including interest, of which there was zero.
Such programs exist already. The SMART program for instance, which links college scholarship to a job. Companies do it all the time.
The issue is that an AI is limited to what the user interface programmed by the company behind it provides. The issue is not the AI algorithms and understanding but rather extremely substandard automation behind it.

Of course one can say that this is not an exclusively AI issue. Call centers, especially offshore ones, have the same problem.
I try to avoid conversations like this rather than engage directly because I'm likely to question results until things are more proven. However, I'm seeing things like this more often and want to become more informed.

When looking at the percentage population of Americans with bachelor's degree (general req for software company), should we see a reflection of that pool in tech companies? I found some census information which shows that the pool of black or African American workers might only be about 5% compared to white. Should the industry reflect this or do we somehow expect to have an unnaturally high diversity?

Someone else pointed out here, but putting the chart at 100% makes me feel like this is a piece for views and not information. It doesn't make sense when showing relative improvement.

https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-19.pdf
I don’t understand. It seems to have a server that runs mongodb to store all data. So This is not decentralized?
While I don't directly agree with jrs95, the fact is that the pills just plain don't work a lot of the time. Google the medical term "treatment-resistant depression". The very first link says "Despite advances in the understanding of the psychopharmacology and biomarkers of major depression and the introduction of several novel classes of antidepressants, only 60%–70% of patients with depression respond to antidepressant therapy." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3363299/) Presumably, the odds were worse before.

Consider, too, that that probably doesn't even include those that develop tolerance effects afterward; with that, the numbers likely climb much closer to 50%-50% or worse.
Moitorama 2018 Talks
Faster Rails CI with Automated Parallel Testing Available to All
Not really - the inflation is currently reported on a "reference consumer basket", which doesn't really represent different segments of society.

In other terms, if you are spending on health care of education you are in a really bad place - prices for those services have risen at about 8x the inflation rate over the last 40 years. IF you are purchasing or building a house you will face prices 3x inflation price. However, if you are mostly buying electronics and software, the prices have actually fallen by about 50-80% over the same period.
Heatmap? There are more of them.
How do you know whether someone was African American based on their resume?
Um, he can offer input. He is the manager of hiring. Open your eyes and stop thinking "I was just doing my job". Get outside the box...
That does depend on the situation. We know that google wanted to buy Github, so a (very unlikely) motivation could be that microsoft bought github to "protect it" from google, or in case of no deal happening, financial instability.

That being said, we have no way of knowing what the true motive of the move is - being sceptical/critical is indeed the correct reaction.
Just yesterday I watched a interview clip on new Yorker from 2017 and it was so lively. 16 hours and this news. Very much saddened. Rip.
The PTBs at my last place of employment wasted an enormous amount of cycles on chatbots, despite pleading that the available platforms to use all sucked.
Interesting, was the picot made for a financial reason, a product/market fit reason, etc?

Like, was the company in financial distress, and the first product wasn't doing well, so they said "I know! We'll make a chatbot!"?
How, exactly? I'm genuinely curious, I haven't seen any sign of "extension" like IE6 extensions to web standards
Yeah, it's really strange that he's not addressing this, since the unikernel answer is relatively straight forward--you just compile in the debugging abilities (e.g., a protected endpoint that lets you inspect the application dynamically). That said, I don't know of any unikernels that support this.
They do it for black kids? Do they go into the inner cities and ask around?
> It seems like examining the end of the funnel (and placing blame squarely on tech companies) is all too easy, and is much easier than addressing a root cause (not enough people of these groups studying CS to begin with.)

If you wouldn't blame companies then the problem wouldn't be fixable by the market. Which would go against the religion that true capitalism solves all problems.
I'm angry at myself for wasting my time reading that garbage.
Rakuten acquires Curbside
>In a lot of countries (80%+) taxi drivers are rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes.

Made up percentages don't count as credible data, unless you can cite the objective and peer-reviewed analysis that demonstrates that over 80% of taxi drivers are "rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes," you're just trying to disguise your opinion as fact.

Which is fine, but just say what you mean - that you imagine most taxi drivers in most countries are probably rude.
In the UK at least, authorities can access data without a warrant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
The meme that you need to start programming from a young age to be successful is dangerous and needs to die.
If the government can order the service they can always fine the provisioner.

Uber tried their shit with Quebec, then two drivers had their cars impounded and that was the end of that.
MS is the biggest open source contributor on GitHub.
It’s a strange situation. We need measures intended to aid diversity, but the ones I’ve observed in practice seem like a CYA for the inevitable report that not much has changed. “Well we’re trying, it’s not like we’re not doing anything.”

My question has always been the same: if/when these measures don’t change anything, what then? The disconnect I have noticed is that there are all sorts of metrics for measuring diversity, but there is no quantitative argument for why the programs intended to aid diversity will raise those metrics. There’s no “this number is too low, and doing xyz will increase it.” Instead it’s more like “these numbers are bad, so we’re doing some stuff.”

Doing things ostensibly intended to improve diversity, but which don’t improve it, is more insidious than just not doing anything. It provides a moral alibi for the status quo but cynically does not actually want to change it. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but we will be if not much changes in a few years.
Thank you for that wonderful quote.
As I understand it there’s nothing stopping a company from setting up a Regulation CF round on one of the crowd funding platforms like MicroVentures or SeedInvest. MicroVentures in particular seems to do deals like this for movie productions, which have a similar structure but also probable Hollywood style accounting.
People know. It's a collection of clues, starting by their name
It’s less than that in a lot of places. It’s a massive societal problem and it needs to be fixed from elementary schools up.
Sure, my main thought is that it's an awkward interface for doing things that require choices specifically - it's slow for chatbots / voicebots to present available choices.
Sounds like the company was dead anyway and you are mistaking causation. Companies that are "alive" don't pivot. Companies that are dying people to avoid death. That the company had to pivot suggests the owners decided the exit strategy wasn't actually realistic.
I actually do more .net coding in side-projects than i do elsewhere! i like working with it
Because every sane person hiring Googles people's names?
Yahoo Buys Viaweb for $49M (1998)
It was painfully obvious to anybody who's used conversational UI in their daily life that this was not going to happen.
The "own fabs" part is actually dragging them down. AMD was in a similar situation before they split off Global Foundries.
This is the approach taken in London: Anyone can AirBnB their property, but only for 90 days a year, unless you have special permission. This prevents people buying up/renting flats just to let them out on AirBnB and putting pressure on the already cripplingly bad housing situation.
I'm a little confused. Are you arguing that unikernels are unfit for debugging or just that debugging is necessary in production? I agree with the latter but not the former.
I think all people with some technical insight could've told you that 3 years ago. But still I'm happy the world finally realizes it. Now it only(!) takes another 5-10 years until my employer figures it out. Some of these bigger companies just start to bet on chat bots, but of course will fail at the same hurdles as everybody else.
> when really we as a national don't honestly want to see marginalized groups succeed

How does that explain the success of Asian Americans?
You don't get to choose where you are born or grow up. You are effectively suggesting that people move a thousand miles away from every single person that they know just to get more favorable mortgage laws. That is not doable without starting from a position of privilege.
Hmm, I used uber in japan when I was traveling there and it worked quite well. What kind of problems were they having?
> Why does no one talk about the "pipeline problem,"

If you go too far, it gets uncomfortable. You have to start asking about genetic, parenting, and culture differences. It's way easier to just implement affirmative action or something similar.
The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History (2017)
I remember a certain Microsoft executive stating:

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"

Times have changed, however it's reasonable to question if the Microsoft DNA radically changed or "not really".
No, but someone's name + linkedin profile (almost always included) tends to give it away 90% of the time. Sometimes you don't know, sure, but usually you do. Just like gender.

We didn't ask, of course.
How do you imagine unikernels run in server applications without a network stack?
"Writers write." -- Stephen King
I used to live about 7 minutes from a Home Depot. Now my closest hardware store is a small chain.

Home Depot's hours were much better. I could run out after dinner.

Last night I accidentally showed up at the local hardware store right after they closed, and there was a steady stream of people checking the door. If there was a Home Depot close by, they'd go out of business immediately just because of their hours.
> On the input side, it’s easier and faster to click than it is to type.

I disagree with this. It may be easier, but it is in no way faster. For those who don't use computers very often I can see it being slower. But for people who use computers on a daily basis, for mice to still be a commonly used input device is disappointing. With constant context switches, moving an object across the desk with you wrist, while keeping your fingers in the same place to click, and carefully putting the cursor just in the right place isn't nearly as fast as the same interface using typing. Or comfortable for that matter.

I'm not saying I disagree with the article as a whole.

EDIT: typo
It's entirely plausible that some people have hereditary character traits that make them less resilient to stress. They're not necessarily depressed because of their genes, but their genes make them more vulnerable to depression.

We observe a similar phenomenon with diseases like type 2 diabetes. People of south Asian origin have significantly higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, even after controlling for diet and lifestyle factors. We have identified a cluster of genes that don't directly cause diabetes, but seem to increase the risk of developing the disease. You aren't doomed to develop diabetes if you have these genes, but you do need to be more careful about your diet and lifestyle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.921
Someone's name + linkedin profile (almost always included) tends to give it away 90% of the time. Sometimes you don't know, sure, but usually you do. Just like gender.

We didn't ask, of course.
I finally moved to Xamarin a few months ago and it's not slower than the native languages. No clunkiness either, it's just bindings to the native APIs after all.
How is it bad for open source? Open source existed before GitHub and will certainly remain after.
I agree and I edited post for clarity.
He said the party reminded him of a scene in the film, “Get Out.’’ Like the movie, the new employees looked like props that were conveniently staged to showcase a more welcoming environment than he felt actually existed.

It's amazing to behold how absolutely toxic tech journalism and our industry is becoming.
Divisive clickbait full of finger pointing, anecdotal evidence and a clear steerage away from causation... yet sitting pretty on the front page of Hacker News. What a shame.
Emirates Planes Could Be Going Windowless
I say go for it, I still love my mid-2014.
I think that the FAA's role is theoretically as you express, but in practice, there is significantly less oversight (especially direct oversight) than implied.

As an example, the crash of N121JM on a rejected takeoff was due (only in part) to a defective throttle quadrant/gust lock design that went undetected during design and certification, in part because it was argued to be a continuation of a conformant and previously certificated design. (Which is relevant to the current discussion in that if you decide to make certification costly and time-consuming, there will be business and engineering pressure to continue using previously certificated parts, with only "insignificant changes".)

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20140531-...

PS: I 100% agree on the NTSB process' contribution to safety.
If you scroll over, it shows that the share increased from 1% to 3% from 2014 to 2017. And the total number of employees has almost certainly gone up in that same time frame.
25% in each: gold/stocks(index fund)/30 year US bonds/cash

Its called the Permanent Portfolio and it has a great long term track record:
https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/permanent-portfolio/
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

I am sure those pointing out a pipeline problem are claiming it begins before college and those engineering degrees would be granted.

Or were you supporting the pipeline theory by showing how few candidates there actually are?
I wasn't aware it was still online...
Isn’t this just ignored largely?
I called this like 2 years ago. I am still waiting for better apps.

http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....
Yahoo Messenger used to be at least as popular as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger are right now in certain countries (at least in terms of percentage of internet users in their respective periods).

Yahoo Messenger losing its relevance was an even bigger failure than Google killing Gtalk (at least Google sort of continued it through the resource and data hog Hangouts).
Google sold off different parts of Motorola. And i believe in the end they still kept some patents. Google didn’t end up losing much money over Motorola.
(Aside from the tragedy that is this news) Kitchens are wonderful microcosms of results oriented management.

You have a highly mobile and mercenary workforce, many alternate employment opportunities with similar benefits (e.g. none), a clearly defined goal (food, on time), high frequency of repetition and a short time to failure loop (great for learning or improving), a reputation with fickle customers to maintain, and a broader taste zeitgeist one has to chase.

It's a hard as nails job, but I learned a lot about management.

Also: un- or semi-documented immigrants usually work twice as hard as Americans, for terrible wages, and are the engine of almost every kitchen. So special note and tons of respect to all the people out there sweating to prepare food & improve their and/or their children's lives.
Mental illness is defined in terms of mental processes that interfere with your life. Suicide is the definition of a mental process that interferes with successfully living your life.

That being said, I agree with your point. One should be the master of their own existence from a certain viewpoint, but we aren't. Humans are social creatures and define our lives in terms of those relationships. Even if you are a solitary hermit, you define your life in relation to the people that aren't around. I'm not trying to be clever there.

I can see where suicide can be considered the most rational response given the right social or societal context. See any number of ritual suicide practices in human cultures.

Again, even the physician assisted suicide that we debate so often make sense in the context of maintaining some notion of dignity in one's familial or social group. When you add human suffering to that situation it becomes a moral imperative, I think. That's just me though.
Unfortunately that's an argument for CLIs, not "chatbots".
We've only started having more remote people about half a year ago, so not an expert, but a great way we've used to tackle the absence of water cooler conversations is using Donut - it's a Slack app that regularly pairs up random team members for one-hour chats. It's a great way for getting to know people you might not work with directly and improve collaboration. We also have daily standup meetings and weekly meetings without a specific agenda (the agenda fills up as a week goes by, and it's sometimes good to just chat and connect too). Hope that helps :)
Make them cheap to mount. At least here in Europe that is the most limiting factor with regards to cost.
The entire premise of the article is false. The article states that "tech companies aren't hiring black workers."

The truth is that black workers aren't applying to tech companies. In the last decade I have never once had a black person interview with me, not a single time. Yet, the black person who is on my team (hired before I joined this team) is one of the most skilled and knowledgeable people I know. He is rewarded for his knowledge and work.

Articles like this are poisonous.
I can’t help but compare this to those angry with George R. R. Martin. Is it inherently selfish for him to not finish his book series? Maybe, but I don’t know if it’s the place of a reader to be arbiter.

My only secondhand anecdote of Anthony Bourdain - and it’s hardly even that - is from the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu community. Apparently he would train at Ralph Gracie’s on Howard when in SF. No commentary aside from this is often a deliberate attempt by an individual at bettering one’s self.
It is known fact that a lot of tech companies hire to fill a "quota". OP is actually right, unfortunately.
Thanks for the feedback :) I think I was more positioning this as "We have hundreds of open source dependencies, can I pay someone (x) to support these all in one go?", mostly due to the proliferation of npm packages!
I have dead comments turned on and it’s not too bad. Unless they have a super-delete power the ratio isn’t bad at all.
Not the OP, but higher availability of guns is correlated with higher suicide rates (most notoriously in US mountains states like Wyoming), because it makes it easier to act on impulse when people hit their lowest points, rather than muddling through because they don't have easy means.

However, I don't see any reporting on how Bourdain died, only that he was found in a hotel room. So unless it comes to light that guns were involved (unlikely, because gunshots would have been heard), I don't think this sad event begs for a discussion of guns as opposed to many other topics around the issue of suicide.