skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dr. Gebru was fired for having consulted a lawyer. (Jeff Dean and others were aware that Dr. Gebru was consulting a lawyer long before her termination). Employers can do stupid things, but not illegal things, and it's beyond stupid to fire somebody for talking to an attorney. Google felt threatened and so they acted, fair and simple. While it's OK to feel threatened, it's not OK to retaliate, which is what Google, legally, did.

Dr. Mitchell was likely talking with the same legal team-- it sounds like Google cited cause for Dr. Mitchell sending documents (non-IP) outside of Google's network. So Dr. Mitchell is almost certainly also a victim of retaliation.

The bottom line: Sundar Pichai has again and again admitted to Google's struggles with retaining or regaining trust, and here he has again failed to act effectively. Google's behavior here is, legally, maximally adversarial and strictly for Google's benefit. Sundar Pichai has failed yet again to show Google can be trustworthy.
People tend to define retribution and the scales in a way that they themselves can be forgiven and return to good standing, but people they don’t like cannot.
Perhaps not: https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/16/are-ethicists-ethical/
A lot of speculation here, but the real reason is likely a mix of export control (ITAR) and proprietary components. Essentially, anything that could potentially be used in a missile is very tightly controlled technology and is difficult to release to the public.
How long before Rust will be mature enough for the task?
> It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.

Wouldn't that conflict with Google's no-politics policy?

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-...
The FBI probably had a copy of the drive prior to her ever realizing she was under investigation. They have some pretty advanced physical access methods, even having cans of spray able dust to ensure nothing looks disturbed.
> and along with it your advantage over [PoS chains]

You're assuming that PoW is better than PoS.
Because you've posted a link containing a lot of misinformation multiple times in this thread, I am posting this video correcting the misinformation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36o4UrS9OS4
"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".

Neither mining pools (who practically have the actual power over transaction inclusion an ordering) nor the miners are cooperating. I'm also certain the CCP wouldn't be practically able to locate and control all of them that easily.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26198948.
It's way more than "just a configuration".

> A function call or a remote call won't change the domain logic

Understanding performance and minimizing failure modes and their impact on larger systems makes for a whole career as "SRE". Making remote calls all over a codebase creates behaviors that are practically impossible to debug or optimize. But the blocker is the network impact of large applications and the emergence of cascading failures.
Wow...looks pretty damn good.

Wonder how intense the rewrite was; David Brevik said that much of the game relied on the precise resolution and framerate for everything to work. It wasn't a matter of just upping the resolution and everything worked fine.

I swear though, if this is anything like Warcraft Reforged, I'm truly done with this company.
Agreed. This article doesn't address "how they work" - whether they "work" in the first place isn't at all clear, given how often they appear to either harm their users or simply do nothing - it's just elucidating "what they do" a little further. Two very different questions.

No small task, of course, and the paper's pretty interesting, but it's not clear this has anything to do with what we call depression.
Are they legally required to hire a independent research? They are doing this for PR, so I expect their guy to say positive things (like, hey!, Google fixed things).

There are circumstances where companies are required to hire people who could reveal bad things (ie: certified accounting auditors). But to hire someone outside of the legal requirements means they are a propaganda machine for the company. That's fair, if it's important, it's the government who should step up.

Someone is getting a reality check.
I think the project is great and I admire your work, but I'm confused about how you position it.

Being "almost" web compatible is not a recipe for success, as it's bound to cause confusion and frustration among folks that want it to be an Electron alternative.

Either embrace Web APIs entirely (perhaps a smaller compatible subset), or just position it as something else entirely, like Flutter.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199410, except the one that only makes sense in this context.

The OP was posted earlier, but that one has the more substantive article. I don't know what the fairest thing to do in that case is, so usually just wing it.
periodically increase the block size, splitting the transaction fee among more transactions. Although larger blocks make it more difficult to produce hashes

Couldn’t they simply lower the baseline difficulty along with a block size?

Edit: and wouldn’t difficulty drop automatically in this case?
you been out on these streets lately? lemme tell ya, you falling on your sword at this time in history without a rock-solid plan in place to keep that bread coming is going to leave you with a lot of regrets, i'll wager. there ain't a lot of companies in the world looking for "quit bc i thought the bosses gave a coworker a bad shake" on a resume, and they sure as hell ain't paying what google is.
Ask HN: Best multiplayer games ideas for office party, group integration, it?
We organize remote office parties from time to time and I thought about playing some multiplayer games with our team. Extra points for someone who suggest something else than chess, boards games or playing cards!

The requirements:
- free
- easily accesible
- no registration if possible
- fun!

I have found already:
- http://www.quakejs.com/
- https://openarena.live/
You can leave politics and religion at the door, but if you serve ham sandwiches at the Christmas party don't be surprised when people complain.
I want to either clear it manually, or have a manual way to put it back on.
why would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them? in the case of google, there's already plenty of people willing to do that for free.
It does have a person that can enforce his single will pretty well, though.

In any case, you can follow it like this:

* Nations desire to control strategic resources

* Bitcoin is one such strategic resource

* To control Bitcoin, you need more than 50% of the network

* China has 65% of the network

* China can control Bitcoin
They probably copied the drive way before she ever realized she was under surveillance.
> On my keyboard, B is exactly equidistant between F and J so I couldn't even tell you which finger is correct for it.

It's not about distance but about logic. If the right index finger does y,h,n and u,j,m then the left index finger does r,f,v and t,g,b. Otherwise your left index only does five letters while your right index does 7.

Depending on how "badly" a staggered keyboard is staggered, some keys can be closer to one hand or another, but it doesn't change what the correct way to touch-type is.

If in doubt, look at where the keys are placed on ergonomic split ortholinear keyboard: the people designing these things tend to know what they're doing.
BTC fork using Algorand consensus. Same bitcoin, same LEDGER, but the consensus technology is vastly superior. Why willfully ignore 10 years of advances in cryptography and distributed computing.
Is the M1 really not competitive with the latest XPS?
That doesn’t answer the question of why she attempted to conceal her identity.

There’s also the question of why the PLA would bother to assign an active duty soldier, with instructions to break US law, if there wasn’t some purpose which the US government would consider nefarious. If this is just harmless scientific collaboration, then why is the military involved?
I'm pretty sure short selling crypto is still a thing. Loss of stake is jut another cost of business.
It's pretty important to get it straight: what files did she move and why? So far it appears she did NOT do an Anthony Levandowski and steal IP. In particular Google has said zero about the actual dollar value of those files, or cited any damages from the movement of the files. It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, and probably pretty wise given Google's maximally adversarial approach to this whole mess.

Yes you should always respect your employer's property. In tech, that's almost always IP stuff: code, diagrams, plans, etc. But don't let an employer defame a former employee with an intentionally "concise" story.
The "official" plan is for low-value transactions to happen on the Lightning Network and high-value (e.g. >$1M) transactions paying high fees to happen on-chain.
It really hasn't, though. There are tons of data recovery services which will, for a fee, recover data from damaged hard drives. The process for recovering data forensically can be quite similar, depending on what the person did to "delete" it.

https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/data-recovery/hard-drive

https://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/scratched-...
Could you share your XMPP setup? What server? What clients for the various operating systems and what setting?
The Colorado has almost 250,000 square miles of basin. The Chattahoochee less than 9000. Atlanta metro is about six million, Las Vegas metro about 2.5.

Politically, the Colorado is a different animal. Mexico is downstream and historically has just had to lump it when the river runs dry. Which it has as the US built dams. And today, it has to make do with just a remaining 5% of the historical wetlands where the Colorado flows into the Sea of Cortez.
Which way round?
Hi Raph, interesting article as usual! I spotted a typo: "demostrates".
You have no idea? For the camera.
I was replying to the Pokemon capture points added to OSM being considered vandalism.
The current plan is to pay for a plant in Mexico in exchange for them to give up their share of water from the Colorado River Compact.
If you give up the wireless portion of that, you have a ton of options. I have an ortho keyboard, wired, and don't mind the wire at all... for travel it's easy enough (my Preonic keyboard from Massdrop came with a case) and the standard USB-C cable is easily detachable and stows nicely. Plus, it doesn't require a battery.

I have a wireless mouse (G Pro Wireless) that is good enough but charging it is pretty annoying.
RE3(reversed source code for GTA3/VC) has received a DMCA takedown from Take-Two
If she didn't do it and they don't have good reason to believe she did, then she could and should easily win a large lawsuit against them, since they have publicly accused her of illegal activity. That is a hugely more risky move than just saying that someone underperformed or was let go for other reasons, and knowing how heavily pre-lawyered everything that Google does is, I highly doubt they would publicize something like that without having evidence to back it up.

Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik she has yet to deny doing exactly what they've claimed. My guess is that in her mind she was doing something totally reasonable by trying to dig up old emails that she remembered that she thought would help her friend's case against Google, and feels that even if that's against the letter of her agreements with the company it should be morally okay. Which is fine as a moral argument, but you're still gonna get fired.
Nobody intelligent ever thought it was sincere
I always wondered if anyone else had this! People I have asked all seemed surprised by the question.
Google didn’t have time to establish and solidify corporate culture before the current trends began.

Microsoft was more entrenched and stable.
Nuclear had many decades in which its cost could drop. That failed to happen. Unlike with renewables, nuclear never had relentless cost decline. Its learning curve has even shown negative learning, with costs rising with time rather than falling. There's something about nuclear that just keeps it from getting cheaper. The scale and complexity of nuclear plants probably has something to do with it, and also the maturity of the non-nuclear side.
Ok I submitted it twice. No sync?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199677
That is fascinating. Sadly No, i never continued dreams. They are a stand-alone experience, so to speak.
It’s not like she’s an ombudsman for Google. If she has concerns she should voice those concerns internally. If she doesn’t feel that her concerns are being taken seriously, she should quit. On the way out the door, she should tell her story.

It’s honestly just basic professionalism. Don’t publicly trash your employer.
> Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could.

That's not correct. Most pools are in China, but the majority of the hash rate is generated in the USA.
Whenever a BTC article makes it on HN, I see a flood of negative comments on how it's a bubble, just for speculation, etc. Can someone provide a solid bull case for BTC?
Does anyone know why the two front wheels are turned inward?
Google manipulates search results to favour certain political beliefs. Censors people on youtube for expressing counter view points. And quite likely has enough power to skew elections. Plenty of what they do wrong is political in nature. And should be open to criticism.
Ask HN: What happened to twofactorauth.org?
When I visit http://twofactorauth.org I get Brainstation instead. Are there any other good sites that catalog 2FA support?
How is Uber a creditor of Levandowski's?

Also, the crux of their arguments is that Levandowski violated the IRS's 'arms length' rule by investing the IRA cash in his own company which later sold for a fabulous profit on the shares he purchased (for pennies per share). I wonder how this would apply to the average software employee who can also, in principle, invest in their own (public) company via their IRA, or, perhaps, purchase shares in their (not yet public) startup via exercise of options (is this even feasible for most people)?
Personally, I think it’s best if scientists lean towards the conservative/skepticism side, to filter out scams or bad science. But there should be a balance between that and allowing new ideas to surface. Do you think it’s taken too far?
Electric cars and their most important features
Speak up internally, sure. Externally?
The CCP's BRI is exactly this.

The US has already started forcing the CCP to divest US ports because of this scenario.
Yeah, why wouldn't a company want a workforce full of yes-men and engineers who care about nothing but making shareholders money and making executives look good?
Interpretation 2 is closest to correct. There was a "day of absence", and in 2017, whites were "invited" to leave the campus for the day's activities. Weinstein protested this in a letter, which led to protests of a violent nature to the point that he had to hold classes off-campus. Weinstein sued over the fact that he had to hold the event off-campus rather than the University maintaining an academic setting in which he could teach. He also needed a police escort on campus. He contended that this represented a hostile work environment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/when-the-left-tur...

http://www.cooperpointjournal.com/2017/04/10/day-of-absence-...
An employer has a vested interest in letting you go can always find a reason that can be summarized as some violation of corporate policy.

Right now I'm writing this during the work day on my work computer.

I forwarded a work email to my own personal email once because my work email client wasn't syncing on my phone.

Could these be used against me if my employer cared enough? Undoubtedly.

OP is preemptively judging Mitchell 1 hour after she announced she was let go. We have no concept if there claims are legitimate and will not survive a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.

Google doesn't care. Paying Mitchell X Million dollars would be just a cost of doing business. In the meantime, an "uppity" provocateur is out of the building and not fighting for change.
Very much agree on that. However people are contributing to this themselves by becoming activists within a company. That’s mingling the personal and the professional.

Also don’t bite the hand that feeds you. If you disagree with the hand so vehemently quit and take up the cause.
.. or you could just switch and fix your bad behaviors.

I would say that as a daily Advantage user for right about 20 years, it's not a keyboard to play games with and it's not a keyboard to use for a very heavy kb+mouse software situation (like cad or photoshop). In those situations you often keep your dominant hand on your mouse at all times and your non-dominant glued to the keyboard. For those situations I have a fairly standard 65% board on my desk. But for coding, emails, etc. That all happens on the advantage.
> A self-consistent rightist could very well support nearly-open borders, and legal protection of the practice of other religions, and oppose attempts to criminalize or otherwise legislate against LGBT things, on the basis of freedom, while at the same time also being somewhat discriminatory on a personal level against one or more of those groups.

They probably could. The large bulk of right wing legislators and media personalities aren't like this, though.
I have a feeling SSRIs work for a reason we would never expect. In fact, I have a feeling nearly all mental disorders work according to rules we do not even imagine now. It seems to me medical psychology has some great analogies to 1320s science, and the only answers that will come will be after my death.
"The monoamine hypothesis, like the neurotrophic hypothesis, is at best incomplete. Many studies have not found an alteration in function or levels of monoamines in depressed patients. In addition, some candidate antidepressant agents under study do not act directly on the monoamine system. In addition to the monoamines, the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate appears to be important in the pathophysiology of depression. A number of studies of depressed patients have found elevated glutamate content in the cerebrospinal fluid of depressed patients and decreased glutamine/glutamate ratios in their plasma.
In addition, postmortem studies have revealed significant increases in the frontal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of depressed patients. Likewise, structural neuroimaging studies have consistently found volumetric changes in the brain areas of depressed patients in which glutamate neurons and their connections are most abundant, including the amygdala and hippocampus."

"Given the effect of antidepressants on the glutamate system, there has been a growing interest in the development of pharmaceutical agents that might modulate the glutamate system. Ketamine is a potent, high-affinity, noncompetitive N-methyl-d-aspartate
(NMDA) receptor antagonist that has long been used in anesthesia and is a common drug of abuse in some parts of the world."

Novel antidepressants now are NMDA receptor antagonists, or take a look at tianeptine which works just as well, yet it only affects your opioid receptors. None of which have to do with the monoamine hypothesis.
You vastly overestimate the command and control capability of China. China and Chinese people are not a Borg.
Justice is a process.

Processes are important for the simple reason that it's much easier to agree on a process than an outcome.

Processes are generally free of context and confounding factors. Mere mortals aren't capable of juding the entirety of one's life, let alone going back generations. So they simply evaluate the question before them about a particular crime.

Sure there are a few exceptions, like when someone is insane or lacks intent. But those are usually quite narrow.

So justice is following the process, not getting to the heart of a moral issue.
It seems like Google really likes firing people instead of free speech. Sure they can do that because of at will employment but at some point it has to start leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouths especially when these firings get publicized. At some point CS grads will start taking this into consideration when it comes to working at places and having their own political views. Who wants to work at a place where there's a witch hunt? This isn't just leftists getting fired either
I'm sure there are good books... what are your goals and where are you starting from?

C syntax is very simple and there aren't a huge number of concepts you need to learn (memory layout, pointers, the preprocessor, casting).

There are tons of projects written in easily-understandable C. cpython is one.
Sure, but email didn't have to compete with anything before it. And even then today email has turned into a surveillance nightmare, not the ideal of the comment above.
> Still waiting for KWin to support adaptive sync in the Wayland session

I'm still horrified by the coupling with each WM or DE that need to reimplement (or use a lib, but that's as interesting as noting that you could reimplement an HTTP server in each high level app by using an HTTP server lib...) all the features of the graphics server.

Are there other examples of systems doing that for their graphic stack, particularly at this level? It feels wrong. It feels almost as wrong as it felt with BeOS depending on the G++ 2.95 ABI for its platform interfaces...
Enjoy paying $21 (including fees) for your can of milk!

Can?!
Pumped THERMAL storage. This is not pumped hydro. Rather, it involves a heat pump, for example compressing argon near-adiabatically, transferring the heat to a hot store (cooling the argon in the process), then expanding the argon back to the starting pressure. The argon is now around at mildly cryogenic temperature, and the cold is transferred to a cold store (liquid hexane, perhaps).

To recover energy, this is reversed, with the temperature difference driving the cycle in the other direction. Detailed calculations with inefficiencies show an overall round trip efficiency of 60% or better could be achieved. All the temperatures are below the creep limit of ordinary steel, so this system would require no exotic materials whatsoever.

It's also possible to design a thermal storage system without the cold store, using the ambient environment as a heat sink when running the generator. In that case, adding a backup heater (burning hydrogen, say) would make the store double as a backup generator at extremely low extra capital cost.
She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee:

> Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence

But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference.

Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?
not surprising. please read 'the age of surveillance capitalism' nearly every move by google (and friends) post-publication (of course, any move pre too) can be captured by the thesis of the book.
Makes sense, and thank you for the updated information. I was looking into C# about a decade ago, and decided against it for the reasons I mentioned. I'm glad to hear that it continued to progress, though I'm a bit too invested in C++ at the moment to revisit that earlier decision.
I really didn't understand why they were doing that. It seemed very strange. I couldn't quite put my finger on why it didn't seem appropriate... just that it seemed wholly irrelevant to how I would decide where to shop. I freely admit, however, that as I middle aged white male I may have some blind spots.