skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company

How do you know that?

I'm a Googler who has zero insight into the Damore case, and opinions are my own.

That being said, in all my experience, Google does not fire for making (honest) mistakes, and Google does not fire on the first offense. If you want to get fired, you typically need to intentionally and maliciously violate express policy, repeatedly.

I don't know if that was the case with Damore, it's just how things are typically handled.
The kind that requires you to collaborate on Slack.
There will be some sense of normalcy, but not the old normal. For example, even an event like 9/11, which is small in the scale of a pandemic, had deep consequences for travel and related industries. There will be traveling after the current pandemic, but it will be much different from what we're used to.
dang. I was ready to go!
Yea and he was essentially complaining about google brainwashing
I routinely go over 10GB of ram with a bunch of chrome tabs, IDE windows, Spotify, chat app, outlook, etc... It's really not hard.
Some Relatively Obscure Bash Tips
Lots of people have stopped flying infant in arms because it’s far safer for babies to be properly secured. The FAA is rather clear on that.

That means the car seat wouldn’t be checked: it would be strapped down to a seat and the baby strapped in that.

In this case, it’s very possible - even likely, because airlines like selling seats - that baby was a revenue passenger entitled to a carry-on bag of its own.
The US withdrew because Russia violated the treaty. Russia wasn't "retaliating" because the whole issue was instigated by them.
I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.
It's not so much a “perverse incentive” for essential workers as a direct attack, as every essential worker who would choose this route to get infected increases the risk profile for everyone they work with (not all of whom are young and otherwise healthy.) But it stops being a problem there if, as most proposals for reopening suggest, general shelter in place is replaced with targeted quarantines of the infected and exposed (and especially if, for this specific option, any resulting lack of employment from choosing voluntary infection by this route is treated as voluntary separation from work and thus not subject to public benefits.)

The perverse incentive would be for non-essential workers, but only if this is coupled with one of the existing proposals for “certificates of immunity” (which there is little scientific basis for, but that's another issue) being a factor in allowing them to return to non-remote work.
Trouble with the FTC is much more responsible for this than advertisers.
Agreed, but the fact that Musk is a billionaire has nothing to do with him giving out hypocritical advice. It's a non-sequitor.

Now in general human beings love giving out hypocritical advice so him being a human is far more relevant than his being a billionaire, at least if our goal here is to talk about his advice and not just use this opportunity to bash billionaires.
> Damore doesn’t strike me as an expert in the field. Just a typical engineer who thinks he knows everything.

FWIW, Damore has a masters in systems biology. This fact was fairly widely reported. So, you can fall back on the facts instead of your own biases (what "strikes" you).
You are literally describing critical thinking. To assume no one would lie, mislead, or even just be blind to their own biases is to be part of the problem.

How did I "convince myself of an ulterior motive"? I read what was written, and then I asked questions and did research. Are these studies he cites credible? [No]. Why would he bring these up? What motivations would be involved? How do the people he is talking about feel? Did he consider their feelings? If I were Google, what are my options, and what are the results of those options?

Dog-whistles and micro-aggressions thrive on failure to ask these questions. It empowers the status quo to entrench so long as they avoid the absolute most stark of statements.
> Just convert the date to 64 or 32 bit integer (or even less depending on the granularity and range of the dates).

We use rfc3339 because there's a lot of gotchas that appear when you conflate civil timekeeping with an absolute time scale. The number of seconds in a day is not constant, and generally only known a few months ahead of a coming leap second. Civil timekeeping syntaxes can deal with this gracefully exactly because they're a structured representation rather than absolute nanos relative to some epoch.
High-risk groups can take extra actions for defense, early detection & early treatment.
Google didn't fire Damore when he wrote the memo. They didn't fire him when he shared it for feedback. They didn't fire him when it was internal discussion. They fired him when it leaked to press and there was a social media furor.

The idea that Google fired Damore for anything other than bad publicity is not supported by evidence. They asked him for feedback. He provided an intelligent and well researched document. They debated it. A social media mob got mad, and Google, being greedy cowards, fired Damore.
Exactly, and he went on to offer more ways by which they could get women into tech based on that study. But I guess that makes you a misogynist
A common objection to this is the proposition that eventually engineering will produce a framework, even if it's not intentional, so why not just choose an existing one and adapt/patch as necessary?

I tend to agree that good engineering teams will produce a useful framework, eventually--but this framework will be very specific to the domain of the problem it solves. It will be extensible and flexible to add new features to. It won't be something that can be generalized well to other problems, though.
I've fried two Macbook Airs by spilling drinks on them.

I've spilled more drinks on a single Thinkpad than all the other laptops I've owned combined. Everything just kept working.

Thinkpads are (/used to be) exceptionally well built. Including under-keyboard drainage.

(Typing this on a Pixel Slate with the Brydge keyboard, which leads to an interesting though: If I spill a drink on this keyboard, at worst I'll fry a completely separate bluetooth keyboard.)
The macbook pro is not competing with the Acer swift. A lot fo people buy for the OS, which Acer doesn't have, and the brand/build quality, which acer doesnt have. For a lot of people, the benchmarks might be among the last thing they care about. The laptops the acer swift 3 should terrify are other 700 dollar windows laptops without the ryzen and as well as any highly premium windows laptops with customers that pay for benchmarks, where eyes might start to wander if, say, the next XPS can't beat a 650 buck acer on benchmarks.
Atul Gawande to step down as CEO of Haven (Amazon/JPM/Berkshire health venture)
I’m pretty sure that google’s “unwritten rule” is THE unwritten rule of society though, which is basically beware of pissing off the mob / be insufferable at your own peril. Asking companies to seriously outline every facet of life there is the ultimate guardrails culture request.
I agree this is an issue in poor areas.

As another anecdote, my wife grew up in a poor housing estate in central Scotland, in a household with bad parents and some domestic violence. There was a fair bit of violence and drugs in the area too.

Almost everyone in the area was claiming at least some kind of benefit, and benefit fraud was absolutely rife.

I got to know the extended family quite well over time. Almost every parent seemed determined to continue the cycle of poverty, and pushed their children to sign up for a council house as soon as they were 16. Fraudulent tactics were often used to get their kids further up the waiting list, or to get their kids into newer/better housing once they had a house. One father set fire to his daughter's house with the hope she'd be moved into a better house. Another smashed in the windows of his son's house, so they could claim he was in danger from imaginary drug dealers in the area.

My wife (and indeed her brother) were however determined to get a decent education and do better, in spite of their parents.

She applied to university, but her mother hid the acceptance letter and tried to push her into a crappy low/paid job and a council house.

Thankfully my wife came across the letter my chance, and her life has been very different from that of her parents.
That can be kind of a good thing, though, right? Gay marriage and evolution are already arguments that are falling off the conservative map at a rapid place. In another 20 years, will "conservatives" effectively be just liberals who don't like socialism? That seems to be the way that politics have been boiling down to: socialism vs capitalism. Everything else is kind of adjacent, but as laws get passed or ideas get effectively mocked on the internet, they drop off because they aren't core to those two fundamental ideas.
“Bill Gates knew (see ted talk), the rest of us didn't.“

Let’s not make Gates into a superhero here. A lot of people knew what would be coming but got ignored.
Finance? WTF? I'm guessing you had one of those "what's the word, uh . . . not finance, but that'll do" moments. We all have those. Just to ensure we're all clear here, though:

Finance is about navigating the particular niceties of dealing with money as a professional, and maybe a little bit of trend-misprediction for the sake of occasionally getting to be a "rainmaker" for some employer. I think you mean economics, which is about the movements of economic agents and of whole economies.

Economics is a "social" science (ignoring for the moment the fact that some economists aren't very scientific), and finance is a (highly lucrative) job field.
The Soviet Union didn't fall apart because of a low standard of living. There were many other geopolitical factors at play but the big one was just an inept government that declined with every new leader. Once you dismantle the cult of personality around communist authoritarian leaders, your population starts looking out for itself and begins to actively question the legitimacy of the government.
I've purchased an Acer Swift 3 (the Intel version) with 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 3:2 screen (which I prefer) but it was 1000€, not $650.
They don’t need to when they can charge you a $50 fee for keeping an account open that costs them virtually nothing to maintain and lending you money at virtually no risk because the Fed can just print more in case they mess up.

> The harm coming from a business like Alphabet significantly outweights the beneficial things they do.

Doubt it. This is first world privileged thinking.
Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity."

A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting.

Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address.

A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company...

Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed.

From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
FlavorDB A resource to explore flavor molecules
I agree with you, but my experience tells me that most people in HN aren't the kind of folks we would meet on GDC corridors.
I certainly won't defend Slack's RAM usage, but assuming only people doing certain sorts of work use it - or rather work at a company that uses it - is just ill-informed.
. . . and yet, if you wanted to improve your ability to make such predictions about society, social sciences would be a better bet than chemistry. Prediction, absent supernatural aid, requires understanding.
Btw, Elon Musk's entire podcast with Joe Rogan (the recent one from which this came) is an interesting listen - https://youtu.be/RcYjXbSJBN8 especially the parts where he talks about Neuralink, Mind Virus..
Ooh, Beeminder fits the bill, I think! (I'm a cofounder.)
The flu vaccine efficiency is rather low, between 19% and 60% depending on the year, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....

But what is interesting is that the current lockdown in Norway killed the flu with season ending abruptly.
If business travel is reduced, you can expect the cost of regular coach class tickets to increase massively as the former pays for the flight and the latter is just there to wring a bit more profit out of the trip.

Business travel right now is non-existent and many companies are finding that things still work just fine without it and will not return to previous spend levels.
It doesn't need to be just prison.Fines would do the job to some degree as well. It was ok to slap kids 20-30 years ago,while now it's pretty much illegal to do so.Is there no slapping anymore?No, some kids still get it, unfortunately,but there's definitely less of it across the board. Failure to provide your own kids a safe, and at least in some way, motivated path to education is failing them for life. It is absolutely devastating to see generation after generation growing like this.'Me need no book bruv' is an absolute norm in certain communities.
I don't understand why people are characterizing his firing as political. If you read his memo, it should be clear that he was fired for being sexist. His memo included a section which stated that women are biologically inferior to men. This immediately makes it very difficult to work with him for women and their allies. I know tech skews male, but software engineers have to interface with many other teams and many other functions, especially at Google. If he actually left out the biological differences claim, Google might not have fired him, but that section left Google no choice. I support discourse in general, but from a business/society perspective, you can't immediately make it difficult for a large plurality of your peers (and vast majority if you include allies) to work with you.

This is only political because right-wing political organizations have chosen to defend someone's sexist memo AFTER THE FACT, to drive the narrative of how Google is anti-right and is a left-wing puppet company. Calling this a political firing is only coopting their ridiculous narrative that he was fired for expressing "conservative values" or their sexist narrative that those conservative values include the fact that women are biologically inferior.
In this instance, both laptops use LPDDR4x, which doesn’t exist in stick form. DDR4 SO-DIMM sockets are a challenge to fit though, so most OEMs take the easy path and go with soldered RAM there anyway.
Dust II
(I worked at Google at the time)

This is false.

Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.

It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.
> It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually wrote the memo.

'Zero' and 'whatsoever' are simply wrong. It's a strawman.

> The "outrage mob" isn't real.

I would certainly characterize the collective behavior of the Google employees as a mob. You can see it for yourself in the exhibits in Damore's suit:

https://www.dhillonlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/201804...

Numerous employees take the stance that violence is acceptable, as long as it's directed towards hateful people. Numerous employees vowing to shun, ridicule and ignore anyone who remotely suggests support or agreement with any part of the memo. Numerous employees taking the stance that dissent is a violent act for which violence must be returned. Shamelessly of all, a senior Site Reliability Engineer vows to "keep hounding Damore" until one of them is fired.

This is not acceptable behavior for a group of people that are ostensibly at the top of their field. They are not faultless. They share, at minimum, some of the blame.

Of course, if you meant your statement to be hyperbolic, then you are being flippant, and needlessly so.
I was using 8GB until recently. It was hell because I was always swapping. Even with an SSD, the lag changing apps was painful.
Here is an example of a plastic miniature Vax 11/780 with emulator https://vxcompany.com/2016/02/13/a-working-vax-11780-revisit...
None of my Chromebooks or MacBooks have ever had an Ethernet port. I have a somewhat older Lenovo that has one, as does a monster 17" Alienware. But they're definitely not common in any portable devices.
I wouldn't presume to speak for everyone, but in my case particularly e.g. when making the leap back to PC away from macs, I poured over maybe 100 of this kind of review before settling on a final choice

If people weren't reading those articles the writers would not be incentivized to write them in the first place.
It's what they call it on their homepage. I didn't want to override that, even though I would've also called it photogrammetry.
It's not just a case of dividing performance numbers by price - obviously the Apple machine is better built. The real question is: Is it built a $1000 dollars better and built well enough to overcome the fact it's slower (in these tests)?

There are some pretty legitimate reasons to come away from Apple products now in my opinion, including some very competitive hardware at lower prices. I've been quite a happy Linux user for a long time now.
Does the moon actually have any resources worth mining?
I don't know why you're being downvoted; this is true for a number of reasons.

1. Used to mac only software or workflow
2. ercieved supramacy in security
3. Ios compatibility
4. etc

The price/ hardware spec ratio by and large always goes to Windows boxes, but for many people the change in OS disrupts too many other areas in life to justify the discount
Someone abusing root access to destroy data doesn't compare at all to punishing unpopularity in a falsely "open" forum. Analogies tend to suck in debates, but yours is particularly bad.
I routinely run several VMs and my next laptop soon will be 32 or 64GB. On Windows my dev machine already uses 8GB with just a few browser tabs open.
Are there any decisions at all for the player in a "flat bet" game? Or is it simply a game of 100% chance then, with all skill/reading your opponent removed?
I think I've only ever heard "card shark" used to refer to a person who is really into the game, plays it competitively, and generally knows the probabilities of various hands, but generally isn't counting cards or otherwise keeping track of any hidden game state. They're also generally into betting strategy, bluffing, reading people's faces, and other such things. I don't think I've ever heard it used to refer to someone playing to win by counting cards, except in case where card counter is mistaken for the above.
That's an interesting interpretations.

I was under the impression the Kansas reference was basically an insult both to the direction of society and Kansas, but then I wasn't sure how that fit in with the claims about what sciences are useful or "real". Yours might make more sense.

Then again, I'm not sure sense is what was being made, there, anyway.
I guess I take issue with this. Google encouraged discussion and disagreement on large mailing lists, unlike most companies. It doesn't seem right that Google would simultaneously sollicit such feedback and then punish somebody for giving them negative feedback.
On the contrary I wish I could buy Mac hardware running Linux. (Or that would work well once I put Linux on it.)
Do members of the IDW avoid criticizing Israel because they support Israel, or because they think criticizing Israel would make it too easy for their opponents to label them as antisemites?

I don't think there is any way of knowing, but I suspect different individuals listed on that page have different reasons and motivations for saying what they say and not saying what they say. I'd bet on Ben Shapiro genuinely supporting Israel, but some of the rest I'm not sure about (I suspect at least some of those on that list are genuinely antisemites. For instance: https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/ukip-candidate-carl-benja...)

Anyway my point is it's much easier to judge people based on what they say, rather than what they don't say.
Indian hospital using robots with thermal cameras to screen coronavirus patients
Awesome, this is getting the idea mill in my head started. Animated short comics would be a great use case.

Need some South Park vector models!
When someone wishes to use prison they are just voicing their frustration at perceived injustice. Same reason some people want to send bankers to prison despite no court having proved their guilt.

The real challenge is that the tools available to is, as a society, to punish perceived injustice are very few. We have fines, prison, and social stigma. You won’t get far with fines for a person already on social assistance. Social stigma is a non-starter in our climate; she’s a single mother trying so hard for her kids! This either leaves prison (as bad of an idea as that is) or admitting that we have not criminalized bad parenting and some people will absolutely RUIN their kids’ lives.

Just giving you context because it’s easy to roll your eyes at someone (“that dummy wants to send her to prison lol”) when I believe there is a deeper explanation.
I am saying that I cannot see how it is morally repugnant to have to pay for the infrastructure that you use.
That's not surprising! The lockdown is a general-purpose counter to droplet/airborne-communicable diseases, it's not done for seasonal flu because the cost is seen as disproportionate to the known benefit. Stopping other communicable diseases is an expected side effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Original link, with no paywall:
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/can-we-escape-from-inf...
Entirely this. As someone who has flown with multiple children and/or infants (I apologize to everyone who hates screaming children on planes), most of the time now you buy a separate ticket for your baby and have them in a carseat that is strapped into the plane seat. It's a logistical nightmare.
Why wouldn't you just give them a direct-link to your "not-youtube" channel?
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