skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's be specific and replace FooSoft with Google.

A quick search suggests that only 20% of programmers in general are female, but 30% of Google programmers are female. I'm not certain these numbers are accurate, but if they are, female programmers are over represented at Google.

That would mean Google hired a greater percentage of female programmers than male programmers. That is, if Google hired the top 0.1% of male programmers, they hired the top 0.15% of female programmers.

If we assume two groups have identical distribution of qualifications, the female programmers hired would have lower qualifications, as an obvious consequence of a hiring policy that favors women. That's not saying women are less qualified, it's saying that Google hires women who are less qualified because they want to hire more women than the 20% that sex-blind hiring would result in.
Yes, I am being sarcastic. It's entirely possible to hate something and yet still need it for money, and it doesn't always make you a hypocrite.
I'm very much against algorithms in criminal justice, particularly where it concerns a person's freedom (as in the case of bail and sentencing). I disagree very much with the entire premise of statutory treatment of alleged criminals. Indeed, many of the things people dislike about "bad judges"-- a lack of empathy/kindness/tolerance, an over- or under-estimation of the seriousness of the crimes or the seriousness of the threat of recidivism, a lack of interest in or consideration of the context in which the crime occurred, and an unreasonable faith in statutory sentencing-- can't be fixed with an algorithm. What the criminal justice system needs is not more rules. It's more flexibility.
>For the second point I think it's pretty well known that markets can only properly function if all participants have the relevant information.

So the markets have been improperly functioning, this entire time, because they didn't have the relevant information...?
"There is simply no way we could avoid this issue - says the only country where this is an issue"
The company I work for has a similar feature. We have a tap on the actual phone network (for some carriers) and can track in real time. If we notice that (407)-555-1212 has placed 100 outbound calls in the past 10 seconds, that's probably a robo call. If it's from a phone number that isn't provisioned (or not in use---there are databases for such information) then it's spoofed. Or it could be a valid phone number whose home switch [1] is in Kentucky making dozens of outbound calls per second from the Barbados, it's probably spoofed as well.

[1] At least in North America, each phone number is assigned a "home switch," which will always be notified where (as in "which phone switch it servicing it" not "at 40°58′35″N 80°8′9″W") it is so calls can be forwarded to the proper switch (think roaming).
I think this issue is illustrated in a different way - the asset/wage ratio of the 70's/80's vs today...

To take a yuppie example:

If you went to work for a white shoe law firm or top investment bank right out of graduate school in the 1970's in new york maybe you made ~$30K a year but a really really nice apartment or townhouse cost $150k-$300K so it was a 5x-10x ratio between starting salary and really nice house

Now the houses that sold for $150k-$300K in the 70's sell for like $7.5m - $30m, but those same first year banking/law jobs at top firms pay like $250k so a ratio of 30x - 120x!!!!
Too bad they fired James Damore for simply wanting to have a discussion about it. I think discouraging people from speaking up on issues is ultimately how we got here.
You've jumped into a discussion about the ratio of men to women in STEM and started talking about equal pay, when none of the parent comments were taking about pay, and the article we are discussing is a study that found women at Google get paid more than their male peers. I'm not sure what's going on here.
Thank you for clarifying. I wasn't sure if the Vectary editor was or wasn't parametric, but it seems clear that it isn't for building CSG models.
I think with enough time spent in a specific car, most drivers don’t really look at the numbers and more at the general direction of the dial. Basically your “under 60” example.

It’s facilitated if you mentaly divide in quadrants: you can identify the first bold tick above the horizontal middle line as 60 for instance, and it becomes extremely quick to know if you’re under, at, or above 60, at one two units of error at most.

You’ll also only need to remember two or three relevant positions.

I tbink digital is fine, I’d just see optimisations when on analog in this specific use case (but it needs to be center and big and clear, a small dial on the side is bothersome)
Why insist on buying in those hyper inflated areas anyway?

Why not go found a millennial utopia in some (as yet) undervalued part of the country, and start creating startups there etc...?
It is common for first time home buyers to get a significant portion(if not all) of their first deposit for their mortgage(often 20%) from either family assistance or inheritance. This is especially common in the more expensive housing markets in the US.
Autophagy's great, but I prefer to boost mitochondrial function. Coconut oil is great to enhance fat burning. Eat a cup of salt to improve your osmotic potential. Watch out for keto flu!

"We're really on a roll catching all this food. We should fast for three days for autophagy and then post on the internet about it" - every good hunter ever
> Discussion of original source (Intercept article): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19303948

Three comments isn't much of a discussion. Per https://hckrnews.com/, that submission never even made it to the front page, while this one did.
Right, the question then becomes "What percentage of programmers are going to need to optimize code beyond the lowest hanging fruit"

I don't know exactly what that number is going to be, but I do know it is going to be a lot less than 100%.
Thank you.

Dehydration can kill you in about two days. We don't treat restaurants as life giving either. We mostly decry them as sources of health problems -- obesity, diabetes, etc.

Feeding people is only life saving if you are feeding famine victims in Africa. It's absolutely not anything important if you are an American stay at home mom cooking from scratch to meet both budgetary and dietary restrictions.

Nope. Such people are obviously a waste of human potential.
Non-residents pay city/state sales taxes as well, and that doesn’t give voting rights either.
My immediate thought is if an attacker gains control of your MySQL server they could use this to help propagate across the network (and of course grab arbitrary data from everything that connects).
Something along those lines was also on my (more vague) list of goals: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-...

At least in my mind that would involve a kind of holding space separate from files (but serving some of those purposes). It's going to involve a lot of large, structured data, remote resources, and potentially "live" entities (like an open tab). All of which are still manipulable entities, but they need representations and a place to exist.
So no one should ever work at a startup?
You're asking me to explain something that may not even be true. According to the article, your scenario is not reality:

> When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
I think the argument is that most programmers don't need to write efficient code.
Pressured is applied to make people fit into the working machine. We're okay with our kids being farmed because we want them to have good money and as good or better a life than ourselves.

My dad wanted to go into art school, but he went into engineering instead, got a visa and moved our entire family to the US. I wanted to go into journalism, but my sister kept telling me I needed to think about my future family, so I went into Computer Science (I'm also in my 30s with no family .. so, yea).

How about instead of telling women they should go for higher paying jobs, we tell men it's okay to go after your dreams. How about we find a way to support artists so they're not selling everything under iTunes/Google/Amazon at a 30% cut!

There is a much bigger problem here of people taking jobs they know they'll probably be unhappy with because they need the money. We are a factory pipeline of misery.
I didn't have any expectations but from anecdotal sampling of homebuyers over the past 20 years in the Bay Area there are lots of parents helping with the down payment, maybe sampling bias but it seem like it's mentioned in most local news articles about the home buying market.
>What I really want is a keyboard centric power user browser. I don’t think any of the big browsers could even turn into something like that at this point. Power user feature like keyboard shortcuts are an after thought.

Big browsers are fine, you absolutely can browse with a keyboard in vimperator/pentadactyl/tridactyl without touching a mouse in months (I do). Other users above/below suggested vimium and vimperator-style extensions, and just look at the difference. Vimium is simple and works great in 9/10 cases, but there's always that one little element or a quirk where it doesn't work. Vimperator and its descendants work everywhere, but they often require a lot of manual labor and workarounds just to be able to put the mouse away. And the difference between 90% and 100% keyboard browsing is massive (no context switching).

Thing is, the modern web itself is super hostile to the keyboard control and power users, I don't think this has anything to do with browsers.
If I want notifications from a tab, I pin it. I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active", and it's always on the tab bar no matter how far you scroll. So for my use case at least, the suspender just has to not suspend any pinned tabs.
Show HN: Live Updating for Any CLI Command
Another input I would add to your list is knowing what the day to day culture of the company is. If it's a total shit show and many many startups are, you might not even be able to last there a year which is the normal cliff before your options start vesting.

>"Only if you know 1 The Cap Table

Are candidates or regular employees ever privy to the cap table? I have asked about it many times when a recruiter has tried to sell me on the joys of options in lieu of pay. Even after accepting a job I have routinely been rebuffed on getting a response to inquiries about the cap table.
We've come a long way since VRML [0] running in java applets!

Re-live the experience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eghlSdGvuC0

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
Ask HN: What job would you offer a person w/experience but now fails interviews?
This question can apply to any theoretical situation with a person that describes the above. Their past experience is mostly relevant to the jobs they interview for. But for some reason, despite demonstrating knowledge to prove their experience, they cannot pass anymore interviews.

Suppose you were able to fill in a paid job for them immediately. That job is whatever you choose. If you had a chance to choose a job for a person that describes the above, what kind of job would it be, and why?
I find kind of hypocrite to reject the idea of a company working in a product that serves the Chinese market (which, btw, is ultra protectionist), while actively consuming goods that are manufactured in China.

I'm not saying that people don't have the right to morally object something like this project, but it's kind of baffling that many are loudly voicing their concerns and demonizing any company that is attempting to do something in China, while looking the other way when tweeting from their Chinese made iPhones, and writing dissenting articles in their Chinese made computers.

People should try to find better ways to calibrate their moral compass and focus their activism into more important and threatening issues. There are liberties that are being violated right here, right now.

If you think you can't work at Google because they are building a product for China, it would be pretty hard to work for any company in America, given how everything in this country is piggybacked on Chinese made goods.
> Google fears China is going to create their own version of Google and will lose access to the country

They already lost access to China nine years ago, and are now trying to get that access back.
>The study found that being held in jail while awaiting trial also makes it more likely that, two to four years after an initial arrest, you will be engaged in criminal behavior or unemployed.

Correlation vs causation, yadda yadda
Building this I used information from CB Insights, which looks at companies that receive VC funding by cohort.
Their most recent report covers companies that raised seed rounds in 2008-2010: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/venture-capital-funnel-2...
From a financial perspective, no. If you get more meaning from it and/or want more responsibilities and autonomy (on average), sure,
I've resigned to never talking during any discussion that has to do with any form of inequality.

As a young, middle class, educated, employed, healthy white male, I'm perceived as the "default settings" of society. No groups are advocating for me because I apparently already have plenty of support.

There's nothing I can do to celebrate who I am because the conversation is so zero-sum. If I'm a white guy making a lot of money in tech, I'm part of the problem.

It's exhausting. Instead of being a booster for causes I think are important, I just stay on the sidelines.

I wonder if all the upvoters are just quieter than the down voters.
Proved their point? Their point didn't make much sense.

What actual engineers NEED to know about floating point numbers could be put on a single A4 page. It doesn't have to be 50 pages, where many of those pages are full of equations that 99% of engineers don't understand.

My point is, because you seem to have trouble grasping this. Most real-world programmers, working at startups or bigger companies, making their WPF applications or Spring applications, or react/jquery/angular apps, or Swift IOS apps, etc, do not NEED to know 99% of this document. For most real-life cases all they need to know is "Use the decimal type if you're dealing with money" or something along those lines.

Why do I know I'm correct? Because I work in an organization with 800-1000 engineers, and I know a fair few of them myself, and I bet maybe 1 person in the org has read this doc fully (and even this is a stretch). But the company stills makes billions in revenue every year like clockwork and the world keeps on spinning.

Hence, this document is for theorists and academics, not for the average engineer making enterprise business applications. If it is for an engineer, it's for someone making extremely niche mathematical software or something equally arcane.
The connection is initiated by someone who isn't authorized for your server. Don't see anything fraudulent in requesting a file they are free to ignore.
Hmm. One thing that is really not covered here, even in the giant asterisk, is the diminishing probability a big acquisition will be clean.

Where by clean I mean: the acquiring company acquires the shares of your company for the stated acquisition value.

These days, it seems like acquisitions often end up using retention packages for key employees, and letting the rest go. The actual per-share purchase price is low compared with the total acquisition value, so even if you're fully vested, not that diluted, etc. -- of a $1B acquisition, very little will go to the actual common stockholders.
You asked a direct question and I gave you an answer why that question isn't the right one to ask. You are now shifting the debate to be about something completely different.

As I have said in other comments in this thread, there is simply not enough information in this article to say definitely whether there is any gender discrimination in pay at Google and if there is, what gender benefits from that discrimination. Too many people in these comments are approaching this article with biases of their own (on both sides).
It's basically the difference between common stocks vs preferred stocks.

The scenario assumes the startup raised ~40M from investors, which is realistic.

So in that case yes, you can own 99.9% of the equity the company, but if it sells for less than the total amount raised, the investors will exercise their liquidation preference rights (typically 1X for clean deals), meaning that they will wipe you out completely and keep the 40M for themselves.

If the startup sells for 50M, the investors can then decide to either exercise their liquidation preference rights and get their 40M (leaving you with 10M, assuming non-participating rights), or they can decide to convert their equity to common and thus get 0.1% of 50M, and you take the 99.9%. They'll take whatever is the most convenient for them, which typically means they'll exercise their liquidation preference rights unless the company sells for more than what they valued it at during their round of investment.
Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity.

I'm sorry, but that's "not even wrong" as Pauli would say.

what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."

Group cultures/subcultures can pass on knowledge, which can then provide advantages and then be transmitted to different groups. No racial or innate superiority or inferiority is needed for such an explanation. This is well corroborated by history. (See Thomas Sowell's Migrations And Cultures: A World View) An example of this is found in the German influences in Mexico, and the part of Monterrey one of my old hackerspace colleagues is from. He's quite proud of the progressive schooling he had and of the engineering culture there. (The story of German emigration has its stories of misfortune as well, including examples of German ethnic disadvantage as well.)

20th century hacker culture has its roots in the model railway building scene, which was largely a male space. There's nothing inherently male about model railway building or hacking itself, but there was something about the subculture which was. If we're to change this, then it shouldn't be done from the punitive and negative standpoint of blame, but from a positive view of transmission. No "inherent" or identitarian notions are needed at all.
Only if you got in really early and even then it statistically won’t happen.

It’s like saying lottery tickets are a bad investment idea. It’s true for far more people than it isn’t.
I don't understand - you think it never happens? Or rarely does? I classify my family in that "rags to moderate riches" story, at least gradually over a couple generations. I'd say it's more common than not that people with money today did come from families without it a couple generations ago.
It doesn't seem like the system dampens. Instead, there seems to be some kind of anger that for 99% of men "privilege" means working hard, making compromises, and other stuff that's roughly as crappy as being a housewife. Men aren't all that happy they've got this "privilege", and when women have the option of being a salaryman they feel like they must have been cheated because it's not a top-floor office where everyone just sips whisky on leather lounges.
I think the reason they did not do that is because it's a JavaScript project and they didn't want to rewrite it in C or another language since there are already lots of emulators in C. But it could be faster if it was compiled to wasm.
Texas has high property taxes and high sales taxes. Both are capped under SALT the same as income tax. Texas is very much impacted.
Of course the infrastructure investment would benefit the Becker area in general and potentially attract other employers, but it seems vanishingly unlikely that Minnesota communities other than Becker would come out ahead on this investment. It may be a net positive for the state as a whole, but it's not just a matter of deciding whether to take less of Google's money or none at all - there are winners and losers, and it's not trivial to see how things net out.

> The sponsor of the bill claims to be supporting it whether or not Google selects Becker.

Well yeah, why wouldn't he? He has plenty of political capital since Minnesota's recently elected governor, a Democrat, is pushing for lots of ambitious legislation. And what's not to like about spending other people's money in your own community?
Unfortunately Simple Tab Groups (or maybe some internal feature it uses, probably hidden tabs) somehow leak resources and end up eating all the RAM for me.

The end of Panorama (or Tab Groups as known nowdays) was a disaster for me, as I don't hesitate having over 3k tabs open.
I think what he's suggesting is feeding the input data that differs only on that variable, and if the algorithm produces differing output, then it is by definition racist (and then you send the authors back to the drawing board to figure out why).
Really informative and inspiring comment.

But I wanted to ask if you ever consider the counterfactual where instead of flying planes you're peeling potatoes for four years? Let's just say due to bad luck or a twist of fate - I didn't know he was Colonel's son!

I mean nothing post discharge sounds like it was too associated with your role as pilot - the benefits are available to any veteran. But it does seem like you live life with a healthy amount of initiative and I wonder if you think about starting life with less role-responsibility or have ever compared peer outcomes in this way?
Google has to move in somewhere, tax breaks or no tax breaks, its a net loss for america as a nation, and a massive net gain for google.
>more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

It's not paradoxical at all - bookmarks are long-term persistent storage, tabs are short-term volatile storage. Data stored on disk isn't less important than data stored in RAM, but any given datum stored in RAM is a lot more likely to be accessed in the near future.
> I also don’t think it’s really comparable to the lottery. It’s like playing the lottery if you could easily afford to have a 1-5% chance of winning... in which case it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to play for many people.

Really? Roulette has odds of 37:1 for a single number which is about a 2.7% chance. Would you take $300k that you could otherwise earn in salary and place it all on a single number? The payout would be 10.5 million which far more than anyone I know expects to get from their stock options even with a pretty good outcome. You'd still be insane to walk into a casino in Vegas and make that bet.
Ah, that's what happened! I couldn't figure out why a certain percentage at series A would yield a higher payout than the same percentage at series B and C…
Google censors it’s results everywhere.

The main difference is in one instance it’s censoring itself + it’s censoring according to localized laws + some activist input (both right and left).

In China it’s basically also following laws to censor material plus doing some real-time censoring and removals.

So it could be argued it’s the kind of censorship that people disagree with rather than in principle being against it.
Wow! Is this really what the developers meant or is this just a mnemonic that you used?
You Should Not Ignore the Mastodon Social Network Any More