skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This based on a bad theory of corporate governance. "Shareholder value" is very vague and doesn't much restrict what companies do in practice. Companies can do opposite things while claiming to care about shareholder value.

Also, due to Google's dual class stock, the founders cannot lose control of the company. If the company has lost its way, you can definitely blame them; they do have the power to make big changes.

Companies like this do care about the stock price, but that's because employees (including powerful managers) own stock or options and want it to go up. If you want a company to pay less attention to the stock market, the best way would be to stop compensating employees this way.
> When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example, Gmail offered the follow-up "do you want to meet him" -- not considering the possibility that the investor could be a woman.

So the option was to remove the gendered pronouns or change the product name to “Google Compose”. I get there there are other arguments for removing gendered pronouns, but is working out the gender from past communications beyond Google? What am I missing?
What's interesting is that English doesn't have a great slot in for gendered pronouns. If we take the example from this article:

- "Do you want to meet him?"

There's no genderless slot in for him/her. If you say "them" that infers multiple or an unknown party. You could use their name (e.g. "Do you want to meet Jim?") but that requires information that their system may not have.

Is there a singular genderless pronoun that would fit in there? Do other languages have a similar limitation?
This will backfire, as in previous experiments: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
I'm not sure I understand, or are you misunderstanding me? Germany could have reduced CO2 output if they had kept their nuclear power stations open, instead they've been running to stand still. That was my point.
I agree with you.
It's linked at the bottom of the imgur link. And scrolling down to page 42 is not exactly quick :-)
For thia reason I hire based on anonymized data that also discards all place name locations and institutions. The result is quite effective, as you are presented with an applications that show only the bare bones of someone's experiences without context that might bias you.
> You confuse your subjective experience with the overall picture.

No it is a common complaint that has been happening for years (over a decade) with all manner of consumer laptops.

> The list of devices which kernel does support is not only incredible, but higher than that of any other OS safe Windows maybe.

Yes and I would wager quite a lot of these devices are for ancient hardware, embedded devices, servers, micro-controller etc and other stuff THAT IS NOT ANYTHING TO DO WITH BUSINESS LAPTOPS and a reasonably priced consumer usb headsets from well known manufacturers.

It is a fallacy that just because there is a large number of devices it also means:

1) They are supported well.

2) They are my devices.

3) That there are other parts of the distro (Pulse Audio, ALSA or whatever the nonsense they are using for an audio stack these days) will interfere with how the device works.

The situation will never change. It will never change because

1) Device manufacturers don't care about Linux. They will care about MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS.

2) None of the large corps that basically contribute to the kernel really care about Linux on the desktop. They don't make a lot of money if any from it. Redhat kinda bother, but they've been bought by IBM now so that won't last much longer.

3) As demonstrated in this very discussion on this topic. Most Linux users will trot out the same tired old excuses why shite doesn't work. They will blame it on Microsoft, the User, the hardware anything other than the accepting the fact that because everyone has their own idea what a distro looks like, the whole community is fragmented. Fragmentation causes problems, instability and compatibility issues.

I've heard it for 15 years now. If I have to use Linux (I do unfortunately), it is whatever the latest LTS of Ubuntu is because it mostly works (it is still shite though).

> And even in windows you will have pretty the same hardware problems, just with the different set of hardware, which you were lucky to avoid. Shit like this [1] [2] is pretty common in windows world as well.

Cherry picking nonsense. The only driver I've needed to install in the last 5 years is my video card driver (I am rocking a 1080Ti, which is rather nice) and a wireless driver in my laptop which took all of 5 minutes to install.

Windows will download the drivers from the internet if it can find them.

> Most of the time you just have an OEM preinstalled for you or even an OS preinstalled on a very particular hardware (macos).

No I installed Windows myself. I always wipe and do a clean install. I've done my own install of MacOS in the past as well (not much point though as they don't fill the OS full of shit).

I've heard all of these arguments before. They are all deflecting blame away from what is the Desktop Linux community. I'd heard these arguments back in 2003. Nothing has changed much in 15 years.

Maybe in 15 years time when Desktop Linux still doesn't work correctly you might get wise to the myriad of reasons why it will never work.

Hopefully I will have retired to somewhere like Cambodia by then.
The persons name works quite well.
I will say that “The Elements of Typographic Style” is still the standard and probably one of the most ‘Textbook’ typography books, it’s still primarily concerned with book typography. It does go into computers and how they have affected typography, but still largely in terms of book layout engines and such. Bringhurst doesn’t even get into other forms of print typography like posters, let alone apps and websites.
I'm in the process of shutting down my business, so anecdotally:

1) Globalization has made it almost completely impossible to make things in the US unless they are massively overpriced goods (ex. luxury items or niche specialty goods). Customers simply won't pay enough to cover your costs. And there's a good chance that if you are successful, someone will copy your stuff, make it in China, and sell it for half your price within 12 months.

2) In California at least, costs are pretty ridiculous for small businesses. Between state, county, and city taxes, high labor costs, ridiculous healthcare costs, rent, insurance costs, etc. etc. It is far more expensive to start a business today as a percentage of expected revenue than it was a few decades ago.

3) The US IP protection and regulatory systems are out of control. Fending off patent trolls, tiptoeing around trademarks, dealing with licensing systems specifically designed to be too burdensome for small companies to bear, spending time and money to deal with regulatory compliance, etc. puts small businesses at a massive disadvantage.

4) Unpopular opinion, but I think today's workers are less suited to small businesses than they used to be. Many younger workers say they want to work for startups, but what they really want is a venture-backed cushy office with catering and perks completely untied to actual business revenue. These types of businesses account for a tiny percentage of actual small business starts in the US, which are often not places today's workers want to work at, let alone stay loyal to.
Understanding Android’s vector image format: VectorDrawable
It makes sense to base things on probabilities, but it also makes sense to play it safe in some cases.

The upside of it predicting him/her is minor and doesn't outweigh the times that it gets it wrong.

"Do you want to meet [name || them]" or simply "Do you want to meet" works well enough usually.
Speaking of outside companies...

"It is as part of this PR campaign that Bin Salman’s visit should be viewed. In exchange for cash, elite universities offer the veneer of a progressive agenda. For instance, Bin Salman’s foundation, MiSK, was accepted as a “member company” to MIT’s Media Lab in 2017, which requires a minimum annual contribution of $250,000 (with a three-year commitment) to the lab. In return, MiSK receives access to the lab’s personnel, technology, and intellectual property." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/30/elite-...
There's still a dance you have to do when you want to change between devices. For example, I want to switch between listening to a podcast on my iPhone to watching a show on my iPad. You'd think that would be quick and easy but it still takes 10-20 seconds.
Ask HN: Do you ever feel powerless in sight of a problem?
If yes, how do you deal with it?

I just spent the whole day trying to get a set up running (Ubuntu + CUDA) and nothing worked. I blindly followed one instruction after the other without understanding anything, which is thoroughly unsatisfying, but taking the time to really understand the problem isn't an option either, since I want to get working on the "real" problem of my thesis. Have you ever experienced something similar? How did you deal with it?
That's easy to answer, people are not as smart and/or professional as you think they should be. They can even do some smart things but be completely ignorant in others.
I checked the cpu stats - and what you describe is definitely accurate - these boxes spend most of their clock ticks on idle...which is amazing. At 3 Ghz and 8 cores - we're talking 24,000 clock cycles to come up with a response.
You can certainly blame the builder, but the "real" engineers I've talked to all spoke of traditions like a _ring on their pinky_ so that when they are signing their name to a design, they are reminded (as the ring touches paper) that their signature affects real people's lives, and that both their professional reputation and personal liability might be on the line if they screw it up.

If an engineer designs my bridge, and it collapses when more than one car is on it, he can't laugh at me for not giving him a spec that included that requirement. Contrast this with software, where if a database stores plaintext passwords, the programmers are probably protected if there is sufficient documentation that the bosses/customer insisted on it.

I'm grateful to have the flexibility of creating effectively magical things that can change easily to meet changing requirements, but I also feel like there will come a time when we will need to have some similar degree of engineering rigor mandated for software.
Why would someone do that if they know the faked degrees or qualifications won't pass the background check eventually? Just to get an onsite interview?
I assume it's to underline the "smaller" argument. Working at Canonical, none of the other companies on that list is "small". I think AirBnB is the smallest that isn't us, and it's got over a thousand.

I don't know how big it was when it made the font though.
This has been my experience. Although I know other languages, when I go to write a solver for CFD, radiation transport, heat transfer, etc I normally have gone with OpenMPI and Fortran. For me, Fortran is almost like writing psuedocode.
The problem may be that the public doesn't seem to get it. They just don't seem to process, or care, that google is mining everything they give them - search, email/calendar/etc, Android, etc etc. I guess a lot of it is behind the scenes enough that they don't understand it or don't get riled up like they do about Facebook and the like.
I'm working on a Fortran book with Manning Pubs [1]. You can browse some of the projects that accompany the book here [2]. At Cloudrun [3], we're running some 900K lines of parallel Fortran in the cloud for on-demand custom weather prediction. Yes, it's very much still a thing, it's just that the application domains isn't as much in the mainstream media nowadays.

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran
[2] https://github.com/modern-fortran
[3] https://cloudrun.co
From a utilitarian perspective, it makes sense why a society would want a quick and simple way to disambiguate between two common categories. When talking about a heterosexual couple, one could say "he gave her", and the meaning of the statement is immediately understood. An alternative might be to have general reusable pronouns that can be reassigned, but that requires additional setup ("Jeff is ze, Stacy is xe", then the main clause, "ze gave xem".)
”the last bombing of the second world war.”

Not even that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan#Atomic_bomb...:

on 14 August […] 828 B-29s escorted by 186 fighters (for a total of 1,014 aircraft) were dispatched; during the day precision raids were made against targets at Iwakuni, Osaka and Tokoyama and at night the cities of Kumagaya and Isesaki were firebombed.
Maybe computers that interact with humans should sometimes err on the side of those humans' feelings rather than cold statistics?

If I were addressing someone whose gender I didn't know, I would just omit a gendered term rather than assume their gender. There's no reason a computer shouldn't do the same.
In other words, machine learning is very good at giving you output like the input, but that doesn't mean the input is good.
Your post really hits the mark for me. One of my favorite compositions is Beethoven's fifth, and I sometimes find myself identifying a new motif or combination of motifs in that work, even after decades of listening to it. It is a very rich piece, and the motifs develop slowly, simple at first but getting more complex in time. Not more complex motifs, mind you, but the same motif gains a few notes here and there, and sometimes shifts slightly. Very rewarding to find new ones, and only by reading your post do I discover that that piece challenges me actively, as opposed to more passive music.

The Wall and The Downward Spiral have similar elements of challenge, now that I think of it.
As an (un)written rule, UNIX commands are mostly silent, and output something if something went wrong. This is one of the things that systemd got right I think.

Yes, it feels awkward at first, but systemd's behavior is not wrong.

edit: oh, downvoted, OK. This is actually an outcome of rule of silence, which is part of the UNIX philosophy [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Rule_of_Silenc...
> Is there a singular genderless pronoun that would fit in there?

By the time English gets this word, if it hasn't already, it will be "them".
And if you don't have a person's name?

The AIs only option in English is to go for him/her.
Agreed. I also wonder what "productive" means. It would be interesting if they framed it in terms of other languages ("I'm as productive as I am in my most-frequently-used non-Rust language") or similar.
What I mean is that the company clearly doesn't care all that much about presenting text, so it is difficult to believe that making text more presentable is one of their motivations.
Well there's definitely a conflict between trying to get things done quickly and reviewing things thoroughly in most development jobs.

You have to weigh the risk of going out of business because you didn't deliver value fast enough vs. the risk of having a security incident.

In the Node ecosystem there are SAAS products (https://greenkeeper.io/) that will automatically update your dependencies, run your tests, and merge in the updates (that line change I showed is an example of what it would look like) if the tests pass. That shows you how much thought Node/JS developers put into upgrading their dependencies.

The event-stream update would be done automatically in this instance because the code still worked, although it was compromised.
If the AI is telling you, "based on the statistics in the field, the odds of this person being a woman, a man, or a non-binary gender are X%, Y%, and Z% respectively," I agree there's no reason for offense.

But if the AI has no information about the email recipient's individual gender, it's much safer for the AI to use the default pronoun (singular they) that English already has where we don't want to assume the gender of a particular person, or else for it to avoid the use of a pronoun.

If a person who is not a man works in a male-dominated field and gets mislabeled as a man, it just makes them feel out of place and unwelcome. Doubly so if the AI-generated words are attributed to an individual colleague who knows their actual gender but doesn't fully edit the suggestion before sending.
In many Latin languages all nouns have genders, which surely never made sense, but here we are thousands of years later.

French speakers: is there some process under way to address this? Given that the word “doctor” itself is masculine, is that inherent bias disturbing to people?
> Then isn't that a fair assumption for an AI or any one to make?

Sure. They are just choosing not to make that fair assumption even though they could make a correct guess more often than not.

> If you're offended

I don't think it's about being offended. It's about reducing bias.
>Leading to a situation that down the road we might have repeated the same mistakes like previous generations before us did: Leaving the actual problems, and it's solutions, to following generations, who gonna curse us for our naivety and hubris.

This is also the case if we do nothing. Consider that the alternative to Nuclear is baseload generation with coal, oil and gas, which we know for a fact are destroying our environment by raising global temperatures. And they're ruining our air. They're not going away any time soon, either.
Jeez. SJW mods?
following the thread to learn the names of the popular fonts :)
That's an interesting perspective! So you believe that one's race or gender or age should be a factor in predicting whether an applicant will be a good fit for a particular role?
To me it seems counterproductive. Either whoever lies in CV more will win (be interviewed at least), or bias will show itself during personal interviews. You can't look at a person without realizing sex/age/race.
My god, "key technical words" and "impact statements". Those likely have a negative correlation with competency.
And if the employees placed thier values over profits, why are they still there?

I wonder if they are going to refuse their stock based compensation?
> I'd say that the modern Fortran is almost completely backwards compatible with legacy FORTRAN, as far back as FORTRAN IV (predecessor to FORTRAN 77).

That's very impressive! I assumed the compatibility difference was akin to what Perl 6 is to Perl 5- -- that is, not compatible at all.
This is interesting. FreeBSD has some... deficiencies... in the EFI bootloader's selection of memory to use at boot time. I wonder if the FreeBSD EFI boot loader and your hackintosh boot loader could be trashing the persistent memory where this CSM setting is stored. That might be why it is not a commonly reported issue.
Last week's discussion of the TechCrunch article about this tool seems relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18503729
Good call with that sanity check. Patio11's assertion definitely had that paradoxical lightbulb moment that makes you want to believe it is true (a la Malcolm Gladwell), but two data points were all that was necessary to expose it.
It depends on how you look at it. I don't have data that goes back that far, but the graph in this article should be of interest to everyone:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...

Essentially, up to the 1970s, wages followed closely with productivity. Quite suddenly, wages stopped growing while productivity has continued to grow with no sign of catching up.

Take a look at this chart from the BLS:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJ9l_q6VYAERRDt.jpg

What we can take from that is while prices for certain things have declined(e.g. technology, new cars, software, toys, clothes), the price of arguably more important things (child care, medical care, college tuition, textbooks, housing, food) has gone up. Sure, we've been bearing those costs, but the maximization of profits from those expenditures will inevitably cause an adjustment when Americans can't pay for those things anymore.

Americans might technically have a higher buying power than 1900, and especially 1930, but not necessarily in every area or even the areas that are important. If we were to say that Americans have more access to food, clothing, computers, education, etc., it doesn't mean that Americans are actually paying for those things; a lot of the wealth we think we have is coming from record amounts of debt that were unseen in the early 20th century. The things that make it seem like we have more spending power than we did a century ago are being made possible by what could be a ticking time bomb.
Why Google Cloud’s new boss will fail like the old boss
I’ve started, invested, and sold several startups and small buisnesses.

I was alurred into “stability” by staying with the corporation that aquired a startup I was working for. It was my decision, but now I regret it.

I’ve been working tirelessly to transition back into being independent, but now I too have a family to support and the current state of health care coverage in the US is one of the biggest risks I see.

Interestingly, I’ve seen more entrepreneurs lately from countries like Canada and Norway who have founders that aren’t as stressed when compared to here in the states. I don’t have any data points to prove my hypothesis, but I often wonder if we are doing a disservice to ourselves here in the US. I guess only time well tell.
Also they won't need to lift the robot's mass into space (which costs on the order of $5000/kg), so for most of the 'bots, they will be able to easily add additional shielding around critical electronics. Robots which are intended to fit into very small spaces might not have this option, but also hopefully will be cheaper than their larger brothers.

I wonder how many robots will become part of the contaminated decommissioning waste. Perhaps they will develop robots to disassemble and store the damaged and contaminated robots, filling a function like decomposers in nature.
Passenger service system, basically it's the core IT system of any travel company (airlines mainly, but also trains and hotels)
Very easy to exec() into an arbitrary binary from these 2nd generation runtimes.

(and, as thesandlord notes below, arbitrary containers is the idea behind g.co/serverlesscontainers)

Disclaimer: I work on GCP.
Where are the results of this Australian study? That news article doesn't list them.

Following through on their source [1], it says that the study outcome actually favors women and minority candidates, but it doesn't say how much, or talk about statistical signifance. It seems like the experiment design has been criticized on this one study too, and not releasing the results seems suspect.

The study also cites that blind auditions were a success for Orchestras [2]:

>In a well-known study analysing data on auditions and hiring by orchestras over this period, Goldin & Rouse (2000) found that the use of blind auditions had a major impact on gender bias in orchestras, increasing the likelihood of female musicians being selected by 25-40%.

[1] http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-...

[2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715
I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters.

The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.
How/why are so many people using nightly as their rust version? Usually companies are conservative about jumping onto newer compiler versions.