skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt

What is the correct racial / gender / sex breakdown for a tech industry with no diversity problems?

I’m not sure how we can say we have a problem if we don’t know what the correct breakdowns are. We’re implementing all these solutions with no metric to measure success. That seems like a perfect system to create more discrimination.
ex-IBMer here. I rode this from 2001 until 2016 when it became clear that breaking up the company (as they recently did) would become the only sensible path forward.

While many poor decisions were made inside of the company, I ultimately blame Wall Street for IBM's downfall. Remember that back in 2011, Palmisano finished strong with IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy, IBM Software delivering consistent >80% profit margins on $10Bs in revenue, and a strong services backlog.

Many don't know that Palmisano's departure was preceded by a Wall Street mediated competition for the successor. IBM Software Group SVP, Steve Mills, was the obvious choice. The guy was a lifetime IBMer, intellectually superb, allegedly with photographic memory, effective public speaker, and with a proven history of leading (at the time) the 3rd largest software business in the world.

Unfortunately, Wall Street didn't like Mills because he did not come across well on CNBC. The guy is chubby and doesn't look like a conventional CEO. So Ginny Rometty, with a claim to fame based on building IBM Global Business Services from on the PwC acquistion became the leading candidate. Ginny is "media friendly" and the diversity factor didn't hurt.

Once Ginny came on board, leadership style changed from long-term to fickle and neurotic. Instead of committing to the hard work of building complex technology (e.g. cloud), any signs of technological challenges became reasons for business strategy changes at the top level. What started as a build decision (IBM SmartCloud) turned into a buy decision (Softlayer), followed by a build decision (IBM Bluemix), and so on.

However, Ginny's biggest failure was her inability to raise capital on Wall Street. IBM's engineers weren't failing at building cloud technology because the engineers were terrible (some were, normal distribution rules still apply) but because cost cutting policies starved engineering teams though attrition and lack of hiring. Staffing a team meant bringing in internal hires w/o the right skill set or taking a gamble on offshore (global) resource. At the same time Google was hiring left and right with comparative ease (as an aside, now they are dealing with the consequences).

Bottom line, Ginny couldn't get the capital to fund internal engineering efforts for the scale of the transformation needed to sustain IBM's success with machine learning (Watson) and cloud.

I place the blame on Wall Street since they made the bet on Ginny and then left her out to dry.
It does apply at scale. If one company were to “hire [another] company to ship a package”, there would be no question that the delivery company would be liable if their driver did something negligent. If they meddled in the delivery company’s affairs, specified almost every aspect of their operations, entered into a sole-source agreement that forbids the delivery company from working for other customers, then that is an entirely different matter.
Hey! I was really interested in applying to one of your roles and consider myself to be well qualified but your application is honestly 10x the amount of effort compared to anything else.
I think the questions you are asking are indeed good ones but I don't think it's fair to expect candidates to answer all this upfront.
> I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question

I'm pretty certain that if I asked HR about this, they would say what Google said: Don't ask this question as it could be viewed as discriminatory. I don't think Google is an outlier here.
Australian oral history has made well-tested geographical depictions that go back 10,000 years, so it's not inconceivable that myths and stories could have influences 50,0000 years ago.
> In this case it self regulated because the market rate for drivers was too high.

It what way has it self regulated? Amazon could setup a new set of captive small businesses to exploit and nothing will change. It's not like they were actually dependent on these people in any way. It seems like they're running a model that's at least partially about exploiting their vendors' hope and ignorance, and there's a sucker born every minute.
Amazon fronts the startup afiak and controls who gets to start the business. Unionizing this is a tough nut, what you are witnessing is not a usual labor protest--this is a Management protest.

The Independent operators are shuttering in protest rather than keep suckling.
2 delivery companies quit.that leaves 1998 others. This is lower than an employee attrition rate. It is only newsworthy because it involves Amazon and they gave a reason which confirms a popular media narrative
Search for "initiate", "headers", "open mail relays"; In addition to the law the FCC has additional legal guidance available.
Bamboo and Seawater: The Makings of a Better World
This is an interesting analog of the problem retail workers have on shift scheduling and shift changes.

"One day Amazon dictates that you have thirty routes, the next day forty, then the day after twenty. You’re supposed to have enough drivers for back-up while Amazon is lowering pay. Amazon’s actions are unlawful."

Delivery is probably something you want to run in house and not outsource. It opens them up to another group that could push to unionization though which is probably why they went the Uber route.
I've called it "The Fully Mechanized Stack Overflow Brigade" before, and everything that comes to light supports that assessment.

On the upside, think of the consultancy fees you can charge to clean up those messes.
One important distinction is that now Google is able to inject code to apps without notice since they are the ones who sign the final APKs.
> The ruby one isn't outright terrible, but shows a very Americanized way to do street addresses that would probably become a problem later.

As someone who has been coding up address storage and validation for the past week in my current job, that one really made me laugh. Mostly because it tries to simplify all the stuff I have been analyzing and mulling over for a week into a single auto-complete.

Spoiler: The Github Copilot's solution simply won't work. It would barely work for Americanized addresses, but even then not be ideal. Of course trying to internationalize it, this thing isn't even close.

I get what Copilot is trying to do. But at the same time I don't get it. Because from my experience, typing code is the fastest part of my job. I don't really have a problem typing. I spend most of my time thinking about the problem, how to solve it, and considering ramifications of my decisions before ever putting code in the IDE. So Copilot comes around and it autocompletes code for me. But I still have to read what it suggested, making edits to it, and consider if this is solving the problem appropriately. I'm still doing everything I used to do, except it saved me from typing out a block of code initially. I still have to most likely rebuild, edit, or change the function somewhat. So it just saves me from typing that first pass. Well that's the easy part of the job.

I have never had a manager come to me and ask why a project is taking so long where I could answer "it just takes so long to type out the code, i wish I had a copilot that could type it for me". That's why we call it software engineering and not coding. Coding is easy. Software engineering is hard. Github Copilot helps with coding, but doesn't help with Software Engineering.
Well the are at least guilty of a moral crime from the point they knew. And that point was a while ago.
Fantastic. But what about sailing boats and -ships? Should they have a rotor too?
Sure, but the fact still remains. There absolutely are people who would behave this way within google, so google's choices are fire hundreds or maybe thousands of people or fire him. It was an easy choice.
Inventor of mRNA vaccines suspended from LinkedIn
California also has one of the highest concentrations of people in prison, it might be cheaper in other parts of the country.
Can't find any free plan either now. I guess they just discontinued them and are not upgrading existing accounts.
Wait until you read about the FBI did to Black civil rights leaders.
Almost 2000 results for one of the comment lines. I'm not going to read through those or check the licenses, but I think it's safe to say that block of code exists in many GitHub code bases, and it's likely many of those have permissive licenses. Given how famous it is (for a block of code) it's not unexpected.

https://github.com/search?q=%22evil+floating+point+bit+level...

A question that popped into my head is: if the machine sees the same exact block of code hundreds of times, does that suggest to it that it's more acceptable to regurgitate the entire thing verbatim? Not that this incident is totally 100% ok, but if it was doing this with code that existed in only a single repo that would be much more concerning.
Okay so I can go vegan but how to reconcile the pet dilemma? Surely my dog or cat cannot live on cauliflower and broccoli.
> The chip business looks promising. Maybe IBM should double down there?

I always thought IBM should have bought ARM, the combination of IBM chip tech plus ARMs designs and Red Hat for the software stack would make for an amazing tech business.
As a long-time Android user, I can assure you Google does this way too often. They just can't leave the notification shade alone, they always redesign something in a subtle and annoying way in there. This year they ran out of ideas, but the marketing department demanded a big release, so they invented this "material you" crap.
The Swiss referendum was discussed at the time here on HN, and the Swiss citizens who commented on it said it was a thinly veiled tax hike and not much more.
Pharo[1]. It's an actively developed Smalltalk dialect. There's a MOOC[2] on it, a superb data visualisation engine with Roassal[3] and a free book dealing with mathemathical algorithms[4] implemented in Polymath. The environment is a great experience to code in, for example, you can actually search a method just by giving a example of what you want to do.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharo [2]. https://mooc.pharo.org/ [3]. http://agilevisualization.com/ [4]. https://books.pharo.org/numerical-methods/
Agree. This is lower than the expected attrition rate. Because it involves Amazon, it is suddenly newsworthy.
I dont know why but this reminds me of the classic HN counter argument to Dropbox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Maybe there's a webapp here...
Copy 1M Redis keys in 2 minutes with Golang
>Shipping is crucial to Amazon's business model. The last mile problem is the vulnerable jugular of the e-commerce industry

This is also why dock-workers unions have historically been very powerful.

https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/FoxHodes...
Because they're failing at capitalism, usually because their competitors are better than them at it. Not because of kindness to employees or somesuch. Capitalists fighting other capitalists as ruthlessly as possible doesn't change my argument.

Also capitalisms demands are just that, demands, its not a guarantee. If company x can't compete, it will quit. If it thinks it can weather a storm because it will be able to compete in the future, it will. Its not generosity. Its just profit-seeking.
Benchmarking OpenCV on STM32 MCUs
Global warming is real but not a crisis (2014)
> Putin's tactics are postmodern, a philosophy that at it's core (despite right wing propaganda around the terms) is intrinsically anti Marxist.

This is what they want the West to believe. They want you to lower your guard, they want you to start working with them, and put thoughts like "hey, maybe those guys are a lesser evil than communists" into your head.

They rely on people who they call "useful idiots" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot) in communist lingo to perpetuate, and spread such ideas to the West.
They don't have to. Amazon has a sweetheart deal going on, there is no downside.

Amazon outsources the insurance, health, org, and most of the business risk to these sole supplier contractors. They can choke them to death and just say, "Welp, time to fund another one" until they get the results they want.

Only Amazon can determine which results are acceptable due to these arrangements.
This is a terrible idea. Children should never be trained to be "polite" to machines. Nor to treat them like people, nor to take orders from them.

Interactions with software are a really bad proxy for teaching kids how to behave around other humans.
It’s about using racial rhetoric in a self-serving way. Isn’t that what people are talking about here?
HR is used to make people fill a series of checkboxes - it isn't there to actually change people.

You're not going to somehow convert these folks to not be discriminatory overnight or even in a few years (as evident from HN). It will be something that will require a lifetime of work and more than just HR doing something.

HR is there to just prevent the assholes from being able to outright do it in the public eye and then the company being held liable for jackass clearly discriminating based upon where the person is from. If you never ask the question and the employee decides to not hire because, "seems like she's from Missouri, never did like those Kansas City Chiefs. Fuck 'em!" Well, employee and company can't be held liable for that decision because only the employee knows they discriminated for that reason and no one else does. But you ask the question - opens the box.
The chip business has so much potential, and they're wasting it all because they're so stuck in their enterprise marketing and sales model. There is so much demand out there for non-X86 workstations with high performance and large core counts, and they won't even touch it. There is so much demand out there for highly scalable and energy efficient cloud professors (to the point that they're developing them independently), and they won't even touch it. Just sell the damn processors to the people who want them already!
Yeah I know what you mean. I think "Lovecraftian nausea" is the best way of describing it
And seems to be praising GPT/Copilot as being amazing, the future, etc? Though with so many deleted comments i'm still quite confused.

Regardless the author and I disagree strongly about the actual usefulness of Copilot. I do think ML could be a huge boon for many human applications, like coding, but it's far far from it. Furthermore Copilot's specific implementation seems to leave much to be desired[1].

To me ML is an infant right now and we're metaphorically and literally expecting that infant to drive a car. ML is in a weird, weird place.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
Taste the Power of Social Proof
Optimal is a superlative, not a comparative, so "more optimal" is a non sequitir.

My opinion is that the web will never be the optimal user experience, although it offers enormous benefits in ubiquity and ease of access. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve the ux of the web up the limits of security, but native solutions will always have a UX edge.

The web is optimal for things that native apps can never match, but ux is not one of those things.
Any black/white distinction is a joke, for that matter. There's never just two sides to any complex issue, but framing it like that is one of the most powerful ruses in the media (and in politics).
It would be a cruelty to your dog to force them to be meatless; from what I understand of vegan ethics, your dog's consumption of meat is ethical.
Sure, but at the end of the day someone had to pay me an integer amount of cents. They wanted a total which was a normal dollar figure. But when you sum up 7.6 times whatever a whole lot, you might get a nice round number or you might get an irrational repeater.

What's notable is clearly no one had actually thought this through at a policy level - the answer was "excel goes brrrr" depending on how they want to add up and subtotal things.
I completely forgot about that honestly. I used some special refinancing offer so all my loans are direct now.
Gusto's a great option (I'm a bit biased, having worked there for like 5 years).
We should be careful not to chastise people from the past from the viewpoint of our comfy and safe lives. It's easy to sneer at our ability to divide people into 'us' versus 'them' over meaningless differences, when it's not you worrying about a night raid where you get scalped and your wife raped.
10 Tips for the Best Media Interview
> What exactly is the goal here?

To mitigate the social harms resulting from the current debt load that have accumulated over decades as part of a process that includes development of policies to prevent getting back to the same state.

(Some of which actually may already have been adopted, as all of the debt areas at issue have seen policy reforms over the last decades that could be part of that, though most cancellation advocates would argue—and I would agree, even though I don't necessarily agree with “cancel it all”—that further work remains to be done.)
Jim Whitehurst fired
This is a malliciously uninformed take; which you seem to imply you already realize with your provocative self attack mocking 'ableism'.

If you have an issue with "Putting people in smaller and smaller box"es then you should start your rants by addressing religion or American voter policy.

Your take reads like in America's history black people were always able to vote and Civil Rights was really a rebranding of their rights because Black Americans collectively just wanted to now call it the 'Black Vote'.

Religions are predicated on in-group out-group dynamics, and the shared schizophrenic delusion of a, specifically old white male in the case of the dominant American religion Christianity, in the clouds telling them to hate homosexuals.

Your take ignores the fact that the oppressor is often the one compartmentalizing.

For example, the church refusing to marry same sex couples. So homosexual specific civil rights movements organize to force the hand of the chuch to begrudgingly allow them to marry.

But some people still want to tell trans people they are forbidden from using a bathroom. So now a T specific civil rights movement is needed from the previous compartment they were just lumped into of 'homosexual' because the L and Gs can use bathrooms without issue.

I agree the end goal should be one category: Entropic Debris. It encompasses all that is and will ever be.

I think compartmentalizing humanity as separate from the rocks we see in the night sky is unscientific, but I can recognise that such a take fails to address any of the frought and nuanced elements of contemporary human social interactions that need to be addressed with specificity.
The headline is completely accurate. "Amazon Delivery Companies", which does not imply all or many. "Revolt Against Amazon, Shut Down", they revolted against Amazon by shutting down. Headlines do not contain all of the details of a story. That is what an article is for.
I wonder when someone will try to use the “it came from Copilot” defense to get away with stealing copyrighted code.
I am very skeptical - they have 99.7% identical DNA, but supposedly an extremely different phenotype.
I wasn't talking about Zaphod. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ruler_of_the_Universe
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Even free software snippets have clauses like GPL or attribution.

Putting GPL code in proprietary codebase would cause a company massive headaches...

So I agree copilot is problematic by default, liability to lawsuits for employers and forced open sourcing, liability to IP lawsuits as well which will end up on employees shoulders.
You can't, but in my experience, for things like stretchable control backgrounds, a <layer-list> with a bunch of <shape>s does everything you could possibly want.
You post a 2014 article why? Why not post a more recent article about the heat wave in the pacific NW?
.. i wish you hadn't made me look. That is painful.
Regarding the comment in the article about the relative quality of life in the wild vs life in various farming conditions: Surely that's irrelevant, as farmed animals would not exist - in the wild or elsewhere - if they were not farmed.

Edit: Note that this is not an opinion about farming, since some farms offer arguably better lives than in the wild, while others offer arguably worse lives.
What's the difference between a "veiled tax hike", and raising money to fight climate change?