A level of control over our own fertility that we have never had before? How fucking stupid are you? We have had condoms for centuries, and even before that, we could just pull out. We have unparalleled control over our own fertility already. The fact that many men can't be bothered to put a small rubber on their dick is stupidity, not lack of autonomy.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft design and build all their own machines, boards, switches, routers, racks, you name it. Apple started later, but they might be there by now. Some of these and many other big companies publish their hardware designs in the Open Compute Project, which Facebook started in 2011. But the global supply chains always end up in China. Because of the size of these companies, every downstream supplier has dedicated processes, buildings, even companies. It's trivial to target these if you are the Chinese government.
I'm very pessimistic about this story: i.e. I'm sure it happened. This isn't exactly easy to detect. And the Chinese government has been trying forever. Operation Aurora happened in 2009. This kind of vector has been predicted (and discussed on Slashdot) for decades, it was bound to happen.
SCOTUS is doing exactly what SCOTUS should do, if by that you mean passing down decisions that this Anonymous Coward personally approves of...
It's certainly got nothing to do with interpreting the Constitution. It's simply picking a winner between a 1925 piece of legislation (Federal Arbitration Act) over a 1935 piece of legislation (National Labor Relations Act), and going against previous SCOTUS decisions to do so.
I'll give you that Gorsuch is doing exactly what he was in reality appointed to do by Trump, which is "be the new Scalia". Friend of the employers, not so much of the employees.
I know it's out of fashion to read TFA, but you could have just scrolled right to the end:
"But why? Why go to so much trouble to identify Satoshi? My source tells me that the Obama administration was concerned that Satoshi was an agent of Russia or China—that Bitcoin might be weaponized against us in the future. Knowing the source would help the administration understand their motives. As far as I can tell Satoshi hasn’t violated any laws and I have no idea if the NSA determined he was an agent of Russia or China or just a Japanese crypto hacker."
Oh and also, this report is literally just a self-sourced blog post.
"Sources: Many readers have asked that I provide third party citations to ‘prove’ the NSA identified Satoshi using stylometry. Unfortunately, I cannot as I haven’t read this anywhere else—hence the reason I wrote this post. I’m not trying to convince the reader of anything, instead my goal is to share the information I received and make the reader aware of the possibility that the NSA can easily determine the authorship of any email through the use of their various sources, methods, and resources."
You're misreading your source material. A Pareto distribution is a special case of a power law probability distribution, which were described by mathematician Derek Price. He was studying citations between scientific papers, which I'm glad you brought up. Scientific papers are the first published example of a scale-free network, the mathematics of which Price studied in detail. They are governed by preferential attachment, in other words, the rich get richer. A scientist who publishes cited papers gets more opportunities and more funds to publish more. A receiver who makes good catches plays more snaps and gets to catch more. A CEO who has proven they can lead a company has a better chance of getting another CEO job, even if they ran their last one into the ground. A wealthy person meets more wealthy people and has more capital to invest with.
This is the way the world works. Ayn Rand described the world as she wanted it to be: littered with a few rare geniuses, herself among them. A comforting but shallow worldview.
Faulty programming? Clearly you've never actually done this shit, or you'd be talking about faultily curating training datasets.
But then you'd understand that doing so is really hard. The training dataset in this case is police reports, judicial summaries, etc. It reflects the biases of those humans in the system.
You'd also understand that the network has indeed ferreted out those deeper patterns: and those deeper patterns are societal racial biases. Like Dawkins's memes.
But since you clearly have not worked in this field, listen to those who have. Like the researchers.
I get that MCSE mills gave you a bad taste, but these bootcamps are really trying to get people started in coding. I followed the narrow traditional path: coded since I was young, did some web dev, got my CS degree, spent my whole working life so far as a comfortable software engineer. I have also volunteered at bootcamps, think they are doing good work, and I wholeheartedly support the trend.
There are some bad bootcamps and they deserve to be regulated, but the growth should show you there's a real demand, and a real need for coders. These bootcamps are filling a need that the traditional 4-year degree path just isn't filling.
These coding schools allow people who didn't get those breaks I did to get into coding. Many are turning to it later in life. Some are engineers who got their degrees decades ago and can't find work today. Some are grads who have found there were no jobs in their field. Some have always wanted to pursue it but have been turned away by social pressure. For some it's the educational path out of their situation. And they may start as web devs, and some will suck, but some will grow further. We need more engineers in the world, not fewer.
It's also true that nobody but gamers, artists, and hobbyists actually needs to own a PC anymore. Many people just need a laptop, and some just need a phone.
You're spot on except 'u' and your lowercase sentence. Phones expand both for you, so nobody actually sounds like that anymore. But yes, we're moving to a more forgiving mode of communicating, and I'm all for it.
I agree with you that we're in Javascript hell. But I agree with OP that View Source is no longer the fix. Like you said, today's Javascript is the output of the compiler, and most of it is retrieved on the fly anyway. "View Selection Source" is still useful, but "View Source" is losing relevance each year. Javascript today is minified, packaged, transpiled, and sometimes even converted into bytecode. Not to mention web devs work in chaos in the first place: it's hard enough to debug a modern web framework if you're looking at the source code and documentation, let alone using View Source.
Or the FTC auditors on site at every Wall Street bank. You can attack the mechanism but that says nothing about the purpose.
If you stated it in plain English, you're saying "I'm against trying to voluntarily fix racial prejudices that creep into ML models because it's as bad as making sure every Soviet army unit was in line with the one-party dictatorship's ideology".
Fiirst of all, it's not true for everywhere in the real world. Most businesses that care about their workers' productivity - arts, engineering, sciences - you already go in late or pretty much at whatever schedule suits you, the same is true of most professions. It's mostly customer-facing (everything from retail to stockbroking) low-level (i.e. not management) jobs that operate on early schedules.
But that misses the broader point. If we decided as a society to change working hours to reduce accidents or improve public health, academia could be trend-setters. When those grads eventually become CEOs and businesses starts clamoring for regulatory change, regulation could change the picture for everybody just like past labor reforms (like maximum hour, night shift, or overtime laws) or regulations on commercial time (like Daylight Savings Time).
"This is how things are done" is not a good reason not to explore this.
That is how most schools used to be a hundred years ago. Of course, it's easy to clamor for that kind of treatment now that you've graduated, you're only inflicting it on others after all.
"Simple". The ML community is very aware of this problem, but sanitizing real-world data that may be shaped by subtle biases is really, really hard. You'd need a dedicated sociology PhD involved in every ML research project - a ludicrous load - and even then you wouldn't catch everything. This is a Hard Problem to be aware of for a long time to come.
Yeah... I gotta say though, ajlisows, in the long run you did her a favor. It's better to know that you're being screwed than not to know it. It's empowering because it lets you make choices about whether you want to stay there, or ask for more money, etc. I'm always in favor of sharing, but it does take courage to have those conversations. I think you did the right thing. I always participate in anonymous salary comparisons forms and answer when coworkers ask me my salary, for precisely this reason.
Reality check: at most employers, if you're an individual contributor at level N, promo to level N+1 doesn't mean you get more responsibility or new expectations. Managers have similar expectations of you, based on what they know about you and the work you do, regardless of what they put down on a form. This is still even more true of raises, which are a form of promotion, but by definition don't carry extra responsibility.
So you think women just inherently want to make less money, not that the system keeps them down. That is the most spectacularly dumb argument I've heard all week.
As someone who's worked in the industry for about 15 years... the wage gap is real. Several of my previous employers published internal figures about it, but the public research as well as the anecdotes I've heard over the years all point to this fact: women are promoted less, get less at promo, are less likely to ask for promotion, and are less likely to be recommended for promotion. Over time this results in a wage gap between similarly experienced and qualified women and men.
Now, some employers take steps to try to make sure that women are recommended for promotion as often as their male peers and/or assign salary programmatically, and they've seen the wage gap shrink and disappear. The same wage gap that you pretend doesn't exist, by the way. But then again you're clearly not speaking from having been around the industry, just from your ass.
I'm really enjoying watching Uber's culture getting its well-earned raking. That alone is worth every article.
As to sexism, there's plenty of new things to say, but each discussion is hijacked by the same 2 or 3 arguments taking place.
But more seriously, every social movement and major event gets its own sea of scrutiny and discussion and ties in to current events. This is tech's sexism moment, and we're in the middle of an unresolved problem. We already did mobile, iPods, Web 2.0, Microsoft vs Linux, Java garbage collection, the DMCA, SCO, the dotcom bust, etc. Every topic had its three headlines a week, then it was resolved and we moved on.
Sexism in tech isn't resolved, and we can't move on until it's resolved or we'd be forced to admit that we're something which none of us want to be.
I've seen people hunt around for shows on Amazon and Hulu or whatever rather than trying to torrent. In fact I have a Roku and it has a built in cross-service search. The studios are not dumb. I wish there was compulsory licensing for movies and shows too, but the fact is, they are making bank on the current model.
(I'm the GP) Not sure what you mean. This is a business product, so your employer already knows everything about you, your name and birthdate and what you look like. If you use Facebook for your personal stuff, it's already tied to your real name and the association is already there. Some of your coworkers have surely already looked at your profile and seen whatever is public. But they won't see anything that is not public if you don't accept their friend requests. If you don't use Facebook for your personal stuff, then there's nothing to associate. If you mean can random Facebook friends of yours see your work activity, the answer is absolutely no.
That's as may be, but when you drive a car a few thousand miles, sometimes you ding it or someone runs into you. Rental car companies charge you for every day the car is out of commission, so your own insurance won't cut it. But if you get their insurance, it pushes it from the $30-$50 a day range to the $70-$100 a day range. Make it 5 days and we're at $500, double your number. But then you also probably have to get a Lyft/Uber to/from the nearest rental car center, typically an airport, rather than driving to/from your own home - add maybe $80. And you'd best pony up $10+tax a day for any additional drivers, because if you don't and they get into an accident, your insurance won't count - oh, and they have to come by with you to sign the rental agreement. Oh and did you say you wanted to rent at Thanksgiving? Say hello to surge pricing, taking you from $500 to $1000-$1500 - if they have a car available. And all this only applies to cities - in small towns you're screwed anyway. In theory this is a good model, in practice it's highly restrictive. I have a hybrid SUV, I would love an electric, but I'm gonna wait until the value proposition is there - 300-400 mile range and widespread superchargers.
You know, Facebook has lists, which are basically the equivalent of G+ circles - you can post to them and view posts from them. It's like having a whole separate newsfeed but just from those people. Dunno how many people use it but to me it's an invaluable feature.
Slashdot Mirror
A level of control over our own fertility that we have never had before? How fucking stupid are you? We have had condoms for centuries, and even before that, we could just pull out. We have unparalleled control over our own fertility already. The fact that many men can't be bothered to put a small rubber on their dick is stupidity, not lack of autonomy.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft design and build all their own machines, boards, switches, routers, racks, you name it. Apple started later, but they might be there by now. Some of these and many other big companies publish their hardware designs in the Open Compute Project, which Facebook started in 2011. But the global supply chains always end up in China. Because of the size of these companies, every downstream supplier has dedicated processes, buildings, even companies. It's trivial to target these if you are the Chinese government.
I'm very pessimistic about this story: i.e. I'm sure it happened. This isn't exactly easy to detect. And the Chinese government has been trying forever. Operation Aurora happened in 2009. This kind of vector has been predicted (and discussed on Slashdot) for decades, it was bound to happen.
Notably, Alaska has a similar system and a yearly oil dividend paid to every Alaskan. You could say Alaska is more socialist than Sweden.
SCOTUS is doing exactly what SCOTUS should do, if by that you mean passing down decisions that this Anonymous Coward personally approves of...
It's certainly got nothing to do with interpreting the Constitution. It's simply picking a winner between a 1925 piece of legislation (Federal Arbitration Act) over a 1935 piece of legislation (National Labor Relations Act), and going against previous SCOTUS decisions to do so.
I'll give you that Gorsuch is doing exactly what he was in reality appointed to do by Trump, which is "be the new Scalia". Friend of the employers, not so much of the employees.
I know it's out of fashion to read TFA, but you could have just scrolled right to the end:
"But why? Why go to so much trouble to identify Satoshi? My source tells me that the Obama administration was concerned that Satoshi was an agent of Russia or China—that Bitcoin might be weaponized against us in the future. Knowing the source would help the administration understand their motives. As far as I can tell Satoshi hasn’t violated any laws and I have no idea if the NSA determined he was an agent of Russia or China or just a Japanese crypto hacker."
Oh and also, this report is literally just a self-sourced blog post.
"Sources: Many readers have asked that I provide third party citations to ‘prove’ the NSA identified Satoshi using stylometry. Unfortunately, I cannot as I haven’t read this anywhere else—hence the reason I wrote this post. I’m not trying to convince the reader of anything, instead my goal is to share the information I received and make the reader aware of the possibility that the NSA can easily determine the authorship of any email through the use of their various sources, methods, and resources."
You're misreading your source material. A Pareto distribution is a special case of a power law probability distribution, which were described by mathematician Derek Price. He was studying citations between scientific papers, which I'm glad you brought up. Scientific papers are the first published example of a scale-free network, the mathematics of which Price studied in detail. They are governed by preferential attachment, in other words, the rich get richer. A scientist who publishes cited papers gets more opportunities and more funds to publish more. A receiver who makes good catches plays more snaps and gets to catch more. A CEO who has proven they can lead a company has a better chance of getting another CEO job, even if they ran their last one into the ground. A wealthy person meets more wealthy people and has more capital to invest with.
This is the way the world works. Ayn Rand described the world as she wanted it to be: littered with a few rare geniuses, herself among them. A comforting but shallow worldview.
Faulty programming? Clearly you've never actually done this shit, or you'd be talking about faultily curating training datasets.
But then you'd understand that doing so is really hard. The training dataset in this case is police reports, judicial summaries, etc. It reflects the biases of those humans in the system.
You'd also understand that the network has indeed ferreted out those deeper patterns: and those deeper patterns are societal racial biases. Like Dawkins's memes.
But since you clearly have not worked in this field, listen to those who have. Like the researchers.
I get that MCSE mills gave you a bad taste, but these bootcamps are really trying to get people started in coding. I followed the narrow traditional path: coded since I was young, did some web dev, got my CS degree, spent my whole working life so far as a comfortable software engineer. I have also volunteered at bootcamps, think they are doing good work, and I wholeheartedly support the trend.
There are some bad bootcamps and they deserve to be regulated, but the growth should show you there's a real demand, and a real need for coders. These bootcamps are filling a need that the traditional 4-year degree path just isn't filling.
These coding schools allow people who didn't get those breaks I did to get into coding. Many are turning to it later in life. Some are engineers who got their degrees decades ago and can't find work today. Some are grads who have found there were no jobs in their field. Some have always wanted to pursue it but have been turned away by social pressure. For some it's the educational path out of their situation. And they may start as web devs, and some will suck, but some will grow further. We need more engineers in the world, not fewer.
It's also true that nobody but gamers, artists, and hobbyists actually needs to own a PC anymore. Many people just need a laptop, and some just need a phone.
You're spot on except 'u' and your lowercase sentence. Phones expand both for you, so nobody actually sounds like that anymore. But yes, we're moving to a more forgiving mode of communicating, and I'm all for it.
I agree with you that we're in Javascript hell. But I agree with OP that View Source is no longer the fix. Like you said, today's Javascript is the output of the compiler, and most of it is retrieved on the fly anyway. "View Selection Source" is still useful, but "View Source" is losing relevance each year. Javascript today is minified, packaged, transpiled, and sometimes even converted into bytecode. Not to mention web devs work in chaos in the first place: it's hard enough to debug a modern web framework if you're looking at the source code and documentation, let alone using View Source.
Or the FTC auditors on site at every Wall Street bank. You can attack the mechanism but that says nothing about the purpose.
If you stated it in plain English, you're saying "I'm against trying to voluntarily fix racial prejudices that creep into ML models because it's as bad as making sure every Soviet army unit was in line with the one-party dictatorship's ideology".
Fiirst of all, it's not true for everywhere in the real world. Most businesses that care about their workers' productivity - arts, engineering, sciences - you already go in late or pretty much at whatever schedule suits you, the same is true of most professions. It's mostly customer-facing (everything from retail to stockbroking) low-level (i.e. not management) jobs that operate on early schedules.
But that misses the broader point. If we decided as a society to change working hours to reduce accidents or improve public health, academia could be trend-setters. When those grads eventually become CEOs and businesses starts clamoring for regulatory change, regulation could change the picture for everybody just like past labor reforms (like maximum hour, night shift, or overtime laws) or regulations on commercial time (like Daylight Savings Time).
"This is how things are done" is not a good reason not to explore this.
That is how most schools used to be a hundred years ago. Of course, it's easy to clamor for that kind of treatment now that you've graduated, you're only inflicting it on others after all.
"Simple". The ML community is very aware of this problem, but sanitizing real-world data that may be shaped by subtle biases is really, really hard. You'd need a dedicated sociology PhD involved in every ML research project - a ludicrous load - and even then you wouldn't catch everything. This is a Hard Problem to be aware of for a long time to come.
Yeah... I gotta say though, ajlisows, in the long run you did her a favor. It's better to know that you're being screwed than not to know it. It's empowering because it lets you make choices about whether you want to stay there, or ask for more money, etc. I'm always in favor of sharing, but it does take courage to have those conversations. I think you did the right thing. I always participate in anonymous salary comparisons forms and answer when coworkers ask me my salary, for precisely this reason.
Reality check: at most employers, if you're an individual contributor at level N, promo to level N+1 doesn't mean you get more responsibility or new expectations. Managers have similar expectations of you, based on what they know about you and the work you do, regardless of what they put down on a form. This is still even more true of raises, which are a form of promotion, but by definition don't carry extra responsibility.
So you think women just inherently want to make less money, not that the system keeps them down. That is the most spectacularly dumb argument I've heard all week.
As someone who's worked in the industry for about 15 years... the wage gap is real. Several of my previous employers published internal figures about it, but the public research as well as the anecdotes I've heard over the years all point to this fact: women are promoted less, get less at promo, are less likely to ask for promotion, and are less likely to be recommended for promotion. Over time this results in a wage gap between similarly experienced and qualified women and men.
Now, some employers take steps to try to make sure that women are recommended for promotion as often as their male peers and/or assign salary programmatically, and they've seen the wage gap shrink and disappear. The same wage gap that you pretend doesn't exist, by the way. But then again you're clearly not speaking from having been around the industry, just from your ass.
I'm really enjoying watching Uber's culture getting its well-earned raking. That alone is worth every article.
As to sexism, there's plenty of new things to say, but each discussion is hijacked by the same 2 or 3 arguments taking place.
But more seriously, every social movement and major event gets its own sea of scrutiny and discussion and ties in to current events. This is tech's sexism moment, and we're in the middle of an unresolved problem. We already did mobile, iPods, Web 2.0, Microsoft vs Linux, Java garbage collection, the DMCA, SCO, the dotcom bust, etc. Every topic had its three headlines a week, then it was resolved and we moved on.
Sexism in tech isn't resolved, and we can't move on until it's resolved or we'd be forced to admit that we're something which none of us want to be.
Guess that would have been a 'no' on Albert Einstein then. Good job.
I've seen people hunt around for shows on Amazon and Hulu or whatever rather than trying to torrent. In fact I have a Roku and it has a built in cross-service search. The studios are not dumb. I wish there was compulsory licensing for movies and shows too, but the fact is, they are making bank on the current model.
(I'm the GP) Not sure what you mean. This is a business product, so your employer already knows everything about you, your name and birthdate and what you look like. If you use Facebook for your personal stuff, it's already tied to your real name and the association is already there. Some of your coworkers have surely already looked at your profile and seen whatever is public. But they won't see anything that is not public if you don't accept their friend requests. If you don't use Facebook for your personal stuff, then there's nothing to associate. If you mean can random Facebook friends of yours see your work activity, the answer is absolutely no.
That's as may be, but when you drive a car a few thousand miles, sometimes you ding it or someone runs into you. Rental car companies charge you for every day the car is out of commission, so your own insurance won't cut it. But if you get their insurance, it pushes it from the $30-$50 a day range to the $70-$100 a day range. Make it 5 days and we're at $500, double your number. But then you also probably have to get a Lyft/Uber to/from the nearest rental car center, typically an airport, rather than driving to/from your own home - add maybe $80. And you'd best pony up $10+tax a day for any additional drivers, because if you don't and they get into an accident, your insurance won't count - oh, and they have to come by with you to sign the rental agreement. Oh and did you say you wanted to rent at Thanksgiving? Say hello to surge pricing, taking you from $500 to $1000-$1500 - if they have a car available. And all this only applies to cities - in small towns you're screwed anyway. In theory this is a good model, in practice it's highly restrictive. I have a hybrid SUV, I would love an electric, but I'm gonna wait until the value proposition is there - 300-400 mile range and widespread superchargers.
You know, Facebook has lists, which are basically the equivalent of G+ circles - you can post to them and view posts from them. It's like having a whole separate newsfeed but just from those people. Dunno how many people use it but to me it's an invaluable feature.