skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why paid maternal leave is forced on employers in European countries, so that they have no choice but to do so.

Employers factor in that risk in their employee payment budget, build up reserves for it in accounting (same as they do with people falling sick or having regular PTO), in some cases governments step in and subsidize wages and that's it.

Employers as a class in general will not ever hand away such things voluntarily, they had to be fought for violently over a hundred years ago in collective action.
This assumes that hiring is random. It's not.
If hiring was truly random, and the percentages of the population reflected the makeup of the workforce, we wouldn't have a problem.

But hiring is based on subjective evaluations of the marble's merits. And it turns out that there are inherent implicit bias in how we evaluate these marbles.

One other important detail is that hiring isn't a one step process - you see 100 candidates, and you pick 15.

Instead it's more like you see 10,000 candidates. You pick 1000 from that based on high level non-data driven heuristics, resume reviews, gut feel, and tea leaves. You put the 1000 through an impersonal online test to whittle it down to 100. Then you actually think about who to hire.

A massive Part of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives is to question how we whittle down those marbles, and if it is essentially random at the start, but with some anti-racial bias, what would happen if we gave the chance to let people who have been historically disenfranchised an opportunity to get deeper in the process. The last step would still always be ultimately entirely merit based, but up until that point there are variables to play with.

But my dude, it's 2020, if you're still asking these questions it's because of deliberately willful ignorance - all this information is out there. You don't have to come in with such basic misunderstandings of how this works.
You piss off regulators at your peril. In the end they're all people and being stymied is going to cause some kind of reaction, likely not one to Facebooks' benefit.
Women are not entitled to money during maternity leave. Just like you are not entitled to having a highway to drive on when going to work. But a prosperous society lead by competent people decides those things are worth paying for via taxes.
We don't discuss Cayley-Dickson construction often enough. Why all systems starting with sedenions are power-associative and have non-zero divisors - where are the properties which are different among them?
> whereas pilots take almost all information from looking at the dials.

Under normal operation, yes, a lot of information is available there however all pilot training is underpinned by learning to fly the plane by eye, without relying on avionics. Mainly due to the fact that they can and do fail in new and exciting ways.

Even a plane's interpretation of its own configuration can be incorrect, resulting in automated systems believing a given control plane is oriented a certain way, when the reality is very different.
I feel like a lot of companies are about to discover why credibility matters, even if you're in a monopoly position.

Sure, FB can claim all these concerns all they want. Why should anyone trust them at their word, at this point?
I’m with you- REI does premium retail really well and that involves more then being just a brand. You can save money elsewhere for equivalent gear, but you won’t get the same service.
Electric (both fully and hybrid) vehicles have the advantage over fuel cell, LNG/CNG and conventional ICE engines in that they can massively reduce brake pad wear/dust by regenerative braking, so only tire wear remains as an issue.
Sure, one with airbags and seatbelts.
Great comment with fantastic context and examples!
Harley screwed themselves in a lot of different ways.

First, they fought to protect their market with tariffs on imported bikes -- okay, fair enough -- but then did absolutely nothing to either grow that market, or innovate on their products at all.

They just kept making the same bike, the same way, for a looooooooong time.

Harley's branding was 100% focused on the "60's Rebel". The Hells Angel, or the dentist that wanted to pretend he was.

The plethora of Japanese manufacturers, instead, worked to bring bikes to the masses. They made more reliable bikes, which were cheaper and easier to own, and marketed them to everybody. Dads. Moms. University students. Normal people, the kind that aren't keen on a Friday-night bar fight.

If Harley had been run by forward-thinking management, they would have worked to create affiliate brands aimed at a variety of different demographics, and really worked to innovate on their reliability and quality. Buell was an attempt at this, but it was too little, too late.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think the practical way of thinking would be:

- seeing L + L = C and converting CM to M ( basically striking L L and C )

- then V + V = X, ( striking Vs and add an X)

Then write whats left:

MMXXXII

Then try to re-write.
People are not being paid for being skilled or educated, but for being useful. It's not a given that Millions of people have something useful to do.

I think usually society regulates itself that way: people who prosper have kids. Because their parents are in a booming field of work, it is likely that there will also be work for their kids. Sometimes there are shifts in economics (for example coal mining going out of fashion), and millions suddenly are without a job. The economy can "buffer" some of that, but not arbitrarily high numbers.

I suppose in the past this was even more obvious, as it was directly food based. I suppose as long as there was more land to convert to farmland, having kids always worked out - if they survived, they could start new farms and repeat the cycle.

There are different strategies, like having as many kids as possible and hoping that some make it.

Nobody is "structuring society" in a cruel way, it is bottom up, individual decisions by people.
We're hiring at Remitly :)
The first rule of ethical programming is to avoid working for fundamentally unethical employers. It can be hard because the more unethical a business is, the more money it has access to.

I spent my whole career not working for Microsoft, Lockheed, Goldman Sachs, Big Oil, Monsanto (now called "Bayer"), FAAG (Netflix seems OK).

You can't usually keep unethical people from using your software, but you don't need to specifically enable them. Little evil leads by insensibly small steps to big evil.
I have a Ural :) Yes on the style part, but also yes on easy maintenance. Only real problem I've had is with the Brembo front brake.
So glad here in Australia we aren't at the whims of if our employer chooses to give us maternity leave or not :-)

https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/maternity-and-parental-lea...
Do you think reddit can be reborn to make it better and not have those problems?

Do you think HN not having pictures plays a role in keeping it cleaner than Reddit?
What type of private forum? Any examples?
Some contraception is free, like not having sex to begin with. I think that "poor people can't afford contraception" is not very convincing. Contraception is not that expensive, either.
This brings back many memories.. I owe my early amazement of being able to "tell machine what you want and it will obey" to guys like that. Here is another nice piece that puts more context on that era and creation of Galaxija [1]

BTW, Voja Antonic left Belgrade few years ago, now living in US.[2]

[1] https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-story-of-yugoslavias-di...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voja_Antoni%C4%87
Maybe we should all refrain from speaking for all pregnant women without having any facts to support it.
Ask HN: No one here talking about what’s happening in the Pacific Northwest?
Why flagged? Seems there is no space for free speech here
They sell almost entirely 'outdoor apparel' that is geared at people wanting to wear the brand. REI used to loon almost like an army-surplus store rather than a clothing store, and the clothing was fully functional but unfashionable. Think 100% wool garments, the scratchy stuff that never wore out and was warmer wet than dry and more equipment than clothing.

My last REI hiking frame was a huge disappointment, it started to have welds cracking after 40 fairly easy miles. They do still have a decent warranty policy, but if I'm up in the wilderness that doesn't do me any good, I just want the same quality as they used to have (I.E. I have inherited gear that is still good after years of abuse, but have bought gear that has worn out in 3 years).

As far as superior competitors, unfortunately they are hard to find. I've had the best luck just searching for army-surplus equipment on ebay, as all the army surplus stores seem to have disappeared. But for apparel, definitely look for vintage Woolrich or wool milsurp. It's scratchy, but that's what undergarments are for, and when you accidentally slide down 200' of snow and get covered it's absolutely the best, none of the more modern gear I've tried even compares.
I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though.
Intel going fabless doesn't mean that the fabs go away. They would most likely be spun off into their own company, similar to how AMD's fab spin-off created GlobalFoundries.
It's important to remember if the goal is to undo "unfairness" that the prescription _cannot_ be "fair". If a scale is weighed down with 5lb on one side and 10lb on the other, adding equal weights to both sides does not create equilibrium. It's ironic and potentially hypocritical (if not acknowledged) that the solution to unfairness is by creating an _explicitly_ unfair system, just with the underdogs on top for once.

Note no value judgement on any of this, it's just a paradox that has been amusing my brain a bit re: social justice. Righting wrongness almost by definition involves more wrongness. "Killing a killer" might be a good summary of the paradox.
The site kaggle.com runs machine learning competitions, one of which is "Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster" [0].

I haven't looked into the site myself; I learned about it from David Spiegelhalter's book "The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data" [1]. The competition's problem of predicting who would have survived the disaster provides much of the motivation for the chapter "Algorithms, Analytics and Prediction".

In that chapter he applies "classification trees" to the problem, talks a bit about ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves, the problem of over-fitting, and other issues.

(Overall, I thought it was a good, well-written popular math book. A bit more technical than average, but definitely not a textbook.)

[0] https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/294/294857/learning-from-dat...
> Every culture has a concept of "nothing" which works for zero. The ancient Greeks debated over whether nothing was a number or not, but that's just a semantic splitting of hairs.

Nonsense. Zero being a number is the conceptual leap. It's important.
That's your concern? Really?

I'm not sure I agree with the rest of the article; it made some bad points and some good ones. And I certainly don't think it's clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking for the exact reasons the author listed, and that this can be solved by adoption the exact solutions the author advocates for. (Again, I'm not saying it's not true, just that I remain unconvinced.)

But...

...it's pretty god damn clear that the fabric of society is in danger of breaking down, certainly in the context of the US, and arguably in the context of the West as a whole.

Glance at the news, fill in your own list: Covid, antivaxxers, Portland, deficits, pension crisis at state and local government level, the increasing partisan divide, the collapse of the business models of traditional media, rampant conspiracy theories, BLM riots, anti-protect violence from the police, the balkanization of the news people consume, Trump, collapsing trust in institutions, increasing politicization of the courts, the stunning lack of Senate confirmed appointees in the current administration, etc., we could go on. At some point we're going to get a Covid vaccine, and we're going to need to launch a massive nation-wide vaccination campaign, but in the current climate literally everything is partisan, a decent chunk of the population has convinced themselves Covid is a hoax, people are resorting to violence when asked to wear a mask. How's that vaccination campaign going to go? Meanwhile the economy is lurching towwards a cliff. When Covid hit the US, it was at the end of the longest economic expansion in US history, but rather than store up resources for the inevitable contraction, the US was running unprecedented deficits. Now Covid has hit; what happens next? Especially if societal dysfunction prevents a coordinated response? And so on, and so forth.

I mean, obviously everything could be fine, but if your concern is that "the fabric of society is in danger of breaking" is just too hyperbolic, I think you need to open your eyes. You can point fingers where you like (and we do, which is a big part of the problem!) but regardless of who is to blame, things are not good.
People would absolutely panic buy a Remington 870, if it was still good. A 12GA pump is a classic "don't know much about guns but want something to keep at home" purchase, and the 870 used to be THE industry standard. But they don't make 'em like they used to.

It doesn't help Remington that the quality guns they made for decades still exist on the secondary market and work just fine. So they are not only competing against their counterparts on the new gun market like Mossberg, but against their past, generally agreed to be better, output.

There hasn't been anything new, tech-wise, in guns for the past 40 years, so you can't beat the old guns with features like how a new phone has a faster processor and better camera. You have to stay on par in terms of quality and hope that people will prefer to buy new for the customer service, parts availability, and aftermarket support.
Given that Monopoly was invented in 1903 to illustrate that exact point we’ve been living with that knowledge for some time. Problem is - those is a position to enact changes are generally those benefitting most from it and therefore the least willing.

What seems to have changed in UK and US politics in recent years is those who have benefitted most from the current system have persuaded those who have most to gain that they’re on the same side.
Don't compare gross income, but net income (after tax, healthcare and especially ridiculous COL) plus the recent anti-immigration swing and chaos in politics - and suddenly the US are not as competitive for foreign talent any more, and Japan and Taiwan certainly have the money to compete.
C. Northcote Parkinson wrote about single reports in his 1995 Parkinson's law article published by The Economist[1]. That's the article that articulated in its first sentence the Parkinson's law we all know.

In the article he explains that a worker that feels overworked prefers to have subordinates rather than a peer of his own level that would be a rival for promotion.

A single subordinate is not ideal because the work would be divided between the two and the subordinate would assume an almost equal status in practice. With two subordinates each is kept in order by fear of the other's promotion and the new manager has the merit of being the only one to comprehend the work of the subordinates. This sets the stage for the two subordinates getting their own assistants. He explain how this new group of people make work for each other.

[1] http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
What about something about what is happening up in Portland and Seattle
CFO->CEO

EJECT!!
Trump's position is, very roughly, "We should avoid war because it's bad for the economy." This is a fairly different take than the progressive "We should avoid war because killing innocents is bad" - in particular, once it's good for the economy (which it often is when you're not in a boondoggle), you're back to agreeing with Cheney.

I won't deny that there's a meaningful difference between right-populism and neoconservatism, but as long as the progressive left remains true to its "bleeding heart" nature (for lack of a better term) for reasoning, I don't think that it's a problem to temporarily agree with parts of the right wing on conclusions. Be glad for the opportunity for bipartisan agreement, and keep advocating for what you believe instead of against what they believe.

(... which goes a bit to the article's point: defining your party's goals as "we disagree with them" is great for attention and voter turnout but not necessarily for doing what's important to your worldview.)
The Stanford kid wants to be Peter Thiel when he grows up.
Does it matter, especially now? It's not like engineers can move freely to the US

If you're getting a "millionaire" salary in India or China does it matter that's not equal to a US salary in dollars?
The promise of capitalism for the average person (as opposed to an economist or a business proprietor) was the ability to vote with your wallet, be it through deciding what to buy or who to work for. You still often hear that message from people who are less aware of the dark clouds up above: "just buy a different product" or "just quit and get a new job" - but centralization and monopolization make either impossible.

Monopolies have an unfair amount of leverage in this game that must be dealt with. Bring in corporate breakups, bring in increased leverage for the workers (it's time to say the u-word), and maybe, just maybe, we can salvage this system yet.

I don't know about you, but it was the dream of making the world better for everyone and not just a handful of CEOs that sold me on the tech industry. I sure would like for that dream to come true, no matter how many zeroes in valuation it costs.
If 95% of people find a place that still doubles the homeless population.
What? Apartheid wasn't slavery. And since when do South Africans want to change the language to bury the past?
We are currently in:

(1) A global pandemic.

(2) A massive protest movement.

(3) The wake of what will soon be millions of evictions, not to mention the current unemployment rate and the effects we're seeing on wealth inequality.

(4) On the inevitable track of climate change displacing tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people. This branch will also lead to some supply-chain and food management issues I cannot even fathom.

(5) A concerning increase in polarization and even fascism. Increasing distrust in science and decreasing certainty in our news sources.

Just off the top of my head.
How do you create planetary structures but with super-companies and rich people?

People don't innovate by themselves. The workers and/or engineers of the US or the world could have pooled their money and built AWS or space rockets, or electric cars. But they haven't. It takes money and actions from few people to get stuff done.
BTW, why is "running the balance" a discrete operation to accountants? Because accountants' source of truth is the transaction log, which they call a "ledger".

Ledger entries look (conceptually, not literally) like this:

|tx id| account | debit|credit|
| 123|Cash (bank 1) | 25| 0|
| 123|Cash (bank 2) | 25| 0|
| 123|Accounts Receivable| 0| 50|

with the constraint that a transaction is not valid unless the sum of debits equals the sum of credits (and, no, you can't have both nonzero debit and credit in one line, though sometimes both are zero).

Accounting is, of course, way older than computers, so accountants like to regularly "close the books" (checkpoint the state and generate reports).

Aside, I think the mental block for techies when it comes to accounting is just that many don't want to accept that accountants understand accounting. It looks like databases to them, and those are TECH!
How to Test More People for Coronavirus Without Needing More Tests
Why do you say that people don't want to work on Industrial jobs and they are the "worst"? I see this point of view regularly regurgitated on HN and I am genuinely puzzled.

That might be true for HN (folks who prefer working at a desk) but that is NOT true for a vast majority of people.

I have both friends and family who love to work on the factory floor/shop - it is more varied and interesting for them. More interaction, more visible output of labour and they don't need to join a Gym as they get enough physical movement in their daily job. They despise the idea of sitting at a desk the whole day.
So both the taxpayer and the employer have to fund their decision to become pregnant, huh? This is quite sad, I am glad that I do not live in Australia, especically when combined with its politicians saying "genius" things such as https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema..., its new encryption law, and its porn censorship.
Bonus: They straight up declined my business because it was too marketing-y for them.

What was too marketing for them? A 100% opt-in list that reminded customers when a product was in stock. Fully made in-house, with captcha, privacy policies, opt-out, and with the user typing their email and name, the complete works for a one-time reminder email.

Nope far too marketing related for them.
> They know nothing about hosting user code, have no way to support a gazillion instances of random customers running random code on a gazillion nodes around the world in heat, rain, ice, whatever. How would you stand a chance doing customer support on that?

They are already doing that for their own code, no reason any CRUD app would behave much differently than teleco code. In fact teleco code has much higher SLO than regular web services.

> There's also security; they can't just store/process customer certificates on minimally secured boxes on street corners. Just about any useful code requires some kind of cert or secret or connection string somewhere.

Already solved problem by using SDS for mutual TLS.

> The way it's working now is telcos are outsourcing it to the cloud providers, and cloud providers are sticking racks in the carriers' metro hubs (with shark/laser requirements). These racks show up like mini regions in cloud providers' portals, so users can deploy VM's there just like any other region.

Do you have any source for this? Which cloud is providing such services and with which teleco?

Edit: https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/verizon-partners-aws-to-br... Looks like it isn't farfetched, AWS is already teaming up with Verizon to provide this.
"crushed", "undeserving winners" - people can still be better off than people in the past, despite there being more richer people than them. And what makes you think the winner's wins are "undeserved"?

PG literally wrote an essay about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html (not sure if it is the one I meant, but it touches on many of the subjects here. Including the "pie fallacy")

In that light, it is more surprising that so many people on HN are in favor of socialism.