skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That has everything to do with politics.

Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics.

Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power.

For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.
>if you're losing very badly and seem like a 'problem gambler', sometimes they'll send someone to try and dissuade you. It's bad PR if the casinos ruin people.

That's a really good point. Casinos aren't a windfall business. They're there to rake the 1% advantage on blackjack. It's important to have people at the tables moving money, not to have 1 person lose their $100k nest egg in 12 hours.
That's a bit of an odd (knee-jerk?) challenge.

1. It's possible that a 48-year-old might have a different perspective, and potentially more wisdom, than his 17-year-old self did? I'm sure many people would make different choices in hindsight, if they could go back to being 15-17 yrs old.

2. It depends what you're trying to optimise for. Even if you are trying to plot a path to being a billionaire, following Elon Musk's path just won't work - huge numbers of other factors and luck involved. But...

3. ...I don't think he was only talking about optimising for personal financial success. It's clear from other comments in the video (on Warren Buffett, for example) that Musk doesn't see the field of investing (to put it broadly - essentially making money by shifting money around better than other people) as an especially worthy pursuit. I interpret this as Musk (rightly or wrongly) seeing his companies (which innovate, and create new products which mostly being some sort of benefit to the world) as morally superior to (in this case) law and investment banking. Indeed, if we were to try to optimise for some sort of worthier goal, it's reasonable that you'd want the best and smartest in the industries where they would have the greatest net benefit for the world.
Awesome stuff! I was just looking at face-api.js the other day, this kicks it up a notch.
I don't know if we're talking past each other, but if you've already done tons of open source, and it hasn't gotten you the skills they want, then is just repeating 'do yet more open source' useful advice? That's what I mean. If someone had done tons of open source and it wasn't coming through in terms of skills I'd give them advice like 'get a friend to help you practice interviewing'.
>Moreover, a person's field of expertise doesn't have any bearing on whether their ideas are correct

Nor does their expertise preclude them from succumbing to personal or institutional biases.
Sure it can! Law school has lead to many technical innovations in international tax law, responsible for outsized contribution margin to shareholder value that motivates the executives at the multinational FAANG that _you_ work for to invest in further improvements to ad optimization.

Now, whether either the innovations that top tier tax lawyers have built deliver long term value or not is a different question entirely, but the same could be said for technical innovations in ML and scalability. Law, ML, scalability, ad optimization -- none of these things contain intrinsic societal good, although they have the potential to contribute towards it.
Google and where i work both benefit greatly from having increased diversity. It massively improves business outcomes over the monoculture culture we used to strive for.

My take is that when you optimize for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity you break something at the opportunity end (its either or, not both.)

Regarding a or b, this is mostly b, lowering the bar. But its also a, sexual discrimination.

If you think its not, please explain how you think it would go down if google was focusing hiring efforts to hire white males because they wanted to match the current male to female ratio seen in engineering schools and currently have too many females in the office.

Because i fail to see how aiming to hire more females than the industry schools can bare simply because there are too many men in the office is anything but sexist.
I have my own opinions, which happen to be different from yours!
1) Before any of these wasteful experiments started, we knew how they'd go

2) Statists and socialists are desperately trying to show BI "works" (or whatever) to be able to justify it

3) Nothing matters though, because most states in the West are bankrupt. They already print money and give it away in all sorts of ways.

When government borrows money that you can't pay off (that is, your ideal share of it), that is already a form of BI.

Please stop trying to persuade us that this makes sense. It doesn't. Socialism and thievery always destroy value.
> Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/56217-times-are-bad-childre...
Not with arbitrary limits on monthly data transfer amounts.
Well, the HN/engineer solution would be to propose the building of a new bridge.

Then we could have a big discussion about funding strategies, metallurgical esoterica, cutting edge topological algorithms for determining best place to add a vertex in the graph, and/or history of Roman land jurisdiction. And we’d all learn something.
Short-Run Pain, Long-Run Gain? Recessions and Tech Transformation (2018)
There used to be this thing said about China vs. the US: That the leadership of elites in China were mostly from Engineering backgrounds, while those in the US went to Law School. The idea is that STEM people are better grounded in the epistemological reality of an external objective universe that doesn't care about your texts, your desires, or your ideology.

My Chinese wife tells me this had reversed itself somewhat under Xi Jinping. (Re: Geeks, MOPS, and Sociopaths?) That regime's performance in the current pandemic crisis would seem to support this, though that government's record has been spotty to poor on the epistemology vs. ideology front for awhile.

The problem with spending so much of one's time wrangling texts which are somewhat abstracted away from reality, is that one can lose touch with the epistemological grounding of reality. One might even start to believe they can start to rewrite reality through strong conviction.

Before all you fellow programmers out there start feeling smug, think about this: As a programmer, one is primarily a wrangler of a particular kind of text. Ever wonder about why so many conflicts in the programming "field" ("" are a reference to Alan Kay) have the tenor of medieval sectarian religious squabbles?
There is. In Studio, go to Settings > Channel > Advanced settings and make a selection.
Then they would lose because he did not say that.
In what way is the Damore memo not scientific? It cites academic research, presents evidence, I think the claims it makes are actually the mainstream ones.

I realize asking you to debunk the whole memo may be a bit much, so can you just point to the single most consequential unscientific part of it?

I read the memo and was horrified by how badly people treated him because of it. To me it seems like a rational and well evidenced document.
Most players don't want self hosting, they want to hit 'join game' and have a nice gameplay experience. They want to form up a team with their buddies and play against similarly matched players (or destroy some newbies). They want consistent ping times, worldwide rankings, and to know they are playing on a level playing field.

As I remember playing in a self-hosted world was one where there were hundreds of barren servers, servers that disconnected mid-game, servers that randomly lagged due to bad internet and unknown server hardware (often shared with the game client) and hacked server galore.
If you were in the 'in-crowd' you had the passwords to servers where the hardcore players hung out and had fun - and you were in the 1%.

The market wants free to play. No really. For every player that claims they want to put down $60 before even playing a game there are 1000 that won't even glance at your game if it isn't free. I can't even recommend $5 iOS games to friends and family without them turning up their nose because they only play 'free' games.

There is a vocal minority of games who feel like the games industry isn't listening to them and not giving them what they want. And they are correct, but the games industry isn't conspiring internally to screw those people, they are just trying to price games in a way that maximizes their potential to pay down development costs and pays for ongoing development and devops costs.
Politics is about how resources should be spent, not how things “ought” to be. Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political, especially about something as charged as gender, no matter how much science you may cite.
>> Hang on to your knowledge of nature people; because this society is going kansas.

To make predictions about society dont you need an understanding of... I dunno. Sociology, Psychology, Politics, Finance, or maybe History?

I dont remember societal forecasting in my STEM classes.

Not meant as a roast, just a mild reminder that the dominant force on earth is people.
> Nowadays it seems more and more common that this phrase is "Too many smart people go into working on ad optimization".

Maybe. At least of the East Coast elite universities, what Elon is saying here rings true to me.
I think that's precisely his point though. It's a waste to society to have someone like Musk working in finance where he would largely be working on financial gain for a small number of individuals. It would be much better for society if our smartest individuals were working on real productivity gains and value creation.

The problem is that a lot of the money is in things like finance and advertising. We could absolutely restructure our economy so that wasn't the case.

Musk makes a lot of grandiose statements, but he's spot on with this one.
Maybe in the US, but in The Netherlands it's high frequency trading.

Flow Traders made 10x because of the novel corona virus. In all fairness that could've turned out very differently. The reason for that: volatility went up, but it could've easily gone down.
> players will leave and not buy any hats and other accessories.

They might go buy another game though... A healthy community built around a self-hosted server tends to hold people for long periods of time.
The beam’s horizontal motion speed goes down linearly with height if the beam is sent from a fixed location.

So, picking 30,000 feet for flight height and 250m/s for the plane’s speed, at 900 feet the beam’s speed would be 7½ m/s. That’s quite doable for birds.

More importantly, if the beam isn’t sent from directly below the plane, and the plane flies more or less directly towards or away from the beam’s source, the speed at which it moves horizontally goes down considerably (1/cos(α), where α is the deviation from the vertical, I think), and its width when flying through it in the direction of the beam’s source at constant height will go up considerably.

The beam’s width, and, with it, intensity, will likely be larger on the ground, but my gut feeling is this won’t be enough to correct for both these factors in all cases (corrections welcome)
>bought / founded two other companies that are killing it by making things better than anyone before them. And now starlink.

Don't forget that he's curing autism, blindness and paralysis, and will eliminate the need for humans to talk within 5-10 years with Neuralink!
This is patently wrong. Plenty of law firms and banks, once they reach a given amount of surplus capital, open up investment arms that can and do invest in long shots that large multinationals like Alphabet have branded themselves for. Don't conflate the brand Alphabet has regarding investment in innovation for a monopoly on that kind of investment in innovation.
If there was one task I would say that robots are uniquely unsuited to perform, it would be this.
Google allows (allowed?) relatively free socialization on internal mailing lists, and there are serious labor law issues with saying "you can talk about anything you'd like as long as it's not company policies or politically controversial".
It's all fun and games until the not inconsiderable amounts of personal and otherwise potentially sensitive data you're required to let them publish as a company official fall into the hands of an identity thief or other fraudster.

Rather like domain ownership records, it is just plain negligent to make these kinds of things totally open to the public now, rather than simply requiring them to be on file with the relevant authority so they can be checked if (and only if) there is a legitimate reason to do so.
Would distributing PC games in their own Virtual Machine mitigate any of the cheating risks?

Now we do have enough RAM, CPU cores and the capability of passing through the GPU to a VM.
They’re just popular politics.

Also, if Congress weighs in on something, isn’t it de-facto political?
Hi HN,

I built (yet another) app to explore coronavirus cases.

Last March, when the virus craziness was exploding, I had built mobile apps with the same functionality, but both Apple and Google refused to accept my app unless it was backed by an official medical or government org. (Google even gave my developer account a strike...jeez). So I turned around and converted it into a web app.

If you're interested, the API that powers the app is available publicly [0]. Time series data is also available, which I plan to add to the app soon.

If you get a chance to check it out I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks for stopping by!

[0]: https://github.com/mirailabs/covid-19
> In general when people give advice but don't bear the risk, the value of their advice is dubious.

If they are a mechanical engineering professor at a good university, they pretty much have borne the risk of their own advice. Most people in upper-level STEM academia could easily get a higher paying job in finance/consulting and have chosen not to.
I live somewhat near Baarle-Hertog. Normally, there's no real issues with the enclaves, since both Belgium and the Netherlands are in the EU. But the coronavirus has caused national policy to differ, with the funniest example being: shops in Belgium were (some have since been allowed to reopene) forced to close, but the ones in the Netherlands weren't, leading to bizarre situations where shops that crossed over the border (sometimes multiple times) had to 'close' the parts located in Belgium, but not the one in the Netherlands. So you would not be able to buy things located in the 'Belgian area'. Crazy, but cool!
What's the most human narrative you're welling to place on Damore, that he might agree with? I'll try to think up a few...

1) Damore may have felt just as uncomfortable as his coworkers with what was being said, just in the opposite direction.

2) Damore, being a little spectrumy, attempted to derive an answer to a question about gender inequality in a cold and rational way, having no understanding that what he wrote would upset people. That's not the same as suggesting what he wrote is "correct." Correctness is irrelevant. As a person also on the spectrum, I can relate to this happening all.the.time. It's very difficult to understand what will upset people if you don't already have a mental rule about it. And rules are narrow.
vim has like the worst default setting than any other app in existence in my opinion and I cannot figure why anyone would want to stick to it.

Unless you have 5+ years of muscle memory (learnt with pain), all the shortcuts are too confusing.
The famously negligent practice of public records...
You should really read a little more history. There's a long, long tradition of "patently obvious" "science" that just happens to justify the continued dominance of whatever group is top at the moment. As I mentioned elsewhere, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent examination of the racial aspect of that.
Ask HN: What does open source from top tech companies say about them?
In my eyes, Google and Facebook seem to be competing in open source, with Flutter vs RN/ react, Tensorflow vs PyTorch, Kubernetes, Go, Fresco and so much more. I don't notice Amazon, Apple or Microsoft (although MS definitely do have some, like Typescript and VScode, the volume doesn't compare). Does lack of open source hint at a place that is moving slower, is less developer driven and more management driven, and would be unlikely to grow in the future or has fewer growth opportunities for developers (relatively speaking)?

Alternatively, it's just because Google and Facebook are more consumer focused and I've systematically found their contributions, where as Microsoft and AWS are more enterprise.

Great, simple OSS catalogs:
https://opensource.facebook.com/projects
https://opensource.google/projects/explore/featured

I mean, just look at the hideous UI at https://opensource.apple.com/
Do they not care?
https://opensource.microsoft.com/?sort=Stars&keyword=&tag=

Anyway, does open source give away any information about these companies. I'm trying to understand how to pick companies for employment/ graduating in a few months.
Adversarial Policies
I'd amend what you say to "too many smart people remain entertained by the outlandish stuff Elon Musk says" (and I'd put myself in that camp), but I agree with the sentiment, as well as those voiced elsewhere in this thread, that you should pay attention to what Elon Musk does and has done, and not so much towards what he says.
I guess OP's point is that authoritarianism is everywhere. Many of the low-level "phd's spreading propaganda" on these contentious issues have authoritarian streaks themselves and even if you don't, making attitudes even more divisive isn't exactly helping anyone.
The article also makes a good point that there is no hard line between library and framework, it is spectrum.
AI Does Nothing in Games and Still Wins
I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.
single deck allows it.
They fired the most vocal guy railing against Damore, so they plausibly could have fired the leaker as well.
They are allowed. But they also need to take responsibility for the consequences of their message. If you alienate half of your colleagues, you'll probably get fired.
Agree. I only watch TV when with family a few times a year. Never had one for 15 years myself.
After his "Free America" comment, everything Musk says ought to be taken with a pound of salt.

It is clear that there is not moral or ethical compass directing his actions. Just a passion, which is good in itself, and has brought enormous good to the world, directly or indirectly.

However, it's high time to stop seeing him as some sort of Tony Stark.
Ok, I thought you meant HTTP compression, but yeah it makes it bigger! jpeg is not interesting to begin with because of artifacts. The dithering is a style, all-in-all my choice had very little to do with actual size savings... it's also simpler = can be displayed on monochrome displays, the code to make it and render it is simpler. etc. etc. Sure in pure bandwidth savings you'll win every day of the week, but in style? Life without art is meaningless for humans. Dithering is minimalism of expression!
This is freaking amazing. So many potential applications. Great work!
Please don't spread ignorant memes written by people with no Lisp development experience.
I don't think that social scientists have a particular strong track record with forward predictions and it is impossible to distinguish those who do from those who don't.
Yes this is a horizontal add, but HADDPD only does a very specific part of a full horizontal add. You can use it to compute x[0] + x[1] in part of a register and x[2] + x[3] in another part, but afterwards you would still need to shuffle and add.
Can you list fields that you feel are in dire need of innovation? Genuinely curious.
Biology has become politicized like climate science did.

With each side discarding the inconvenient truths of science whenever it clashes with their tribal narrative. It's an absolute disaster.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that in the parent comment's particular case, knowingly inviting discussion and then firing people when you get butthurt is stupid.
A priori, it's not guaranteed these people would last long enough in corporate to see a higher total life time income. And the professor is not asking OP to be a professor, but to become a corporate mechanical engineer, which is a very different profession.
A nazi apologist might also argue that going to war with that sort of regime is a violent despotic act.

Let’s be clear. This Damore piece of crap can happily exercise his right to go work for a company that shares his value system. Research what happens to dissenters in “violent authoritarian” systems.

Why should he share the winnings of a system that was built on a value system that he diametrically opposes?
The right wing science deniers focus on global warming and evolution denial.

The left is nuclear power and biology denial.

Overlap on antivax.

Welcome to being hated by both sides of you actually use science to form your opinions, rather than justify preconceived beliefs.
Oh love it
Also Cicero

>The poor are working and working
>The rich exploit the poor
>Miltary protects both

>Taxpayer pays for all three
>Banker robs all four
>Lawyer misleads all five

>Doctor bills all six
>Goons scare all seven

And politician live happily on the money of all of the above.
> Hang on to your knowledge of nature people; because this society is going Kansas.

I don't understand. Hasn't Kansas generally turned away from science and toward religion?
Most of finance that I can see seems to consist of investment firms hiring lots of people with good credentials so that they can convince clients that the efficient market hypothesis actually doesn't apply to their firm, then making off with the profits.

There's a reason only market makers are the ones prop trading any more.
I think the modern conservative movement largely is explained by "a group of people that oppose liberalism." That's why you have such a weird coalition of religious groups, older intellectual conservatives, young Republicans, business people, trolls. They really don't have a ton in common, but frankly I get it. I live in the Midwest and while I consider myself an independent, most of my views are moderate or left-wing. But I went to grad school on the East Coast and I felt like an outsider and the most conservative person in class just for holding somewhat moderate views.
The defense industry is why the internet exists.

You could argue both Tesla and SpaceX orient their goals around human survival and defense. One for slowing down climate change, the other for interplanetary colonization.

Fear motivates society into funding engineering projects and taking action.