JCzynski

As someone who also worked there, the official company line internally is a suspiciously specific denial that does not actually deny the main accusations I had heard previously. I consider it just as plausible that Yelp squelches negative reviews when paid as I did before.

What is the value of Whole Foods without its pricy image?

Before you hit enter Bing gives him as well, with a headshot.

I will communicate cryptographically with people using C, so no.

>How so? I can't think of anything I know about IT and my profession that I couldn't learn from open free sources or experience.

That's irrelevant to the claim being made. It's not education or knowledge that's inaccessible to lower classes, it's the stuff around it. It's nearly impossible to judge just knowledge and skills without any context, and even if you could manage it, it would be an unwise move leading to chaotic work environments. But it's also nearly impossible to judge "would this person be disruptive?" without also sneaking in strongly-class-biased culture fit screening, even if you explicitly prohibit doing so.

(Also, having the time to learn and knowledge of where to go to start learning are class biased. The founding population of tech was a different social community from previous power but still heavily upper-middle-class. (I'd guess tech workers 1990-2010 were about 60% from the second quintile and 80% in the 2nd-4th deciles.) They're skills that anyone could learn, but only in theory; in practice they're skills that anyone with the opportunity can learn, and the opportunity is not evenly distributed.)

If you'd checked the article, you would see that actually he's solidly in favor.

But yes, it's basically "represent a quantum computer of this size", which we legitimately can't do classically beyond a certain size. It's not hugely useful but it's legitimate quantum supremacy, if it works.

Holy mortality, Batman!

>The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

>We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

You'd think they'd sanity check their poetic description against professed beliefs. If your metric says that most Americans "would like to live on a kibbutz", then your metric is wrong.

What this actually shows is that most Americans have no idea what wealth inequality looks like. Ask the same group of people their predicted and ideal income inequality measurements. I predict you'll get the same numbers, plus a little noise.

A closely related question: is asking in terms of percentages biasing? And the answer is: Very Yes. http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121027/jdm121027.html

>Norton and Ariely (2011) set out to answer a remarkably important set of questions: How much inequality do ordinary Americans believe exists in the U.S.? And how much inequality do they desire? These questions have a range of important policy implications. However, the initial answers to these questions need to be reconsidered. Our findings indicate that the remarkably low estimates of wealth inequality given by Norton and Ariely’s respondents depended on the particular measure (quintile percentages) that was used. When asked to state quintile percentages for either household wealth, teacher salaries, or web page clicks, our respondents seemed to use an anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic leading to very similar responses across very different domains.

>When respondents were relieved of aggregating their intuitions about inequality into quintile percentages, another picture emerged. According to this new picture, Americans do not tend to have extremely biased perceptions of current levels of inequality. Nor do they entertain an ideal of near-perfect egalitarianism. Rather they seem to prefer a world where the poor are not as poor as they are today. Further investigation into this more tractable ideal might provide a basis for workable policy prescriptions.

It uses wealth as a measure of inequality, which is an instant sign that it's not written by someone who has thought about the problem and tried to honestly change minds. I'm about to start a first job at one of the big programming shops next month and have been able to pay for Bay rents; according to a wealth calculator, 0% of Americans are poorer than me. This is an idiotic result.

Working Effectively With Unit Tests is quite useful. It's focused on Java but the advice given applies well beyond that.

When this happened with radio we created NPR. Now we need NPN.

It's a public good, not a private one, and so should be funded publicly.

As it is said on Tumblr itself: "This Blue Fucking Hellsite"

Ugh. I wish no one would do this, so I could auto-form-fill things faster.

It's perverse that this article is talking about AI figuring out price discrimination and somehow manages to turn that into "and this will be terrible for the poor".

Price discrimination is _wonderful_ for the poor. Extract tons of money from the rich who don't give a shit, but still sell the service to poorer people at a price they can afford, with almost all the same benefits.

That can't be right. I basically don't eat fish because it's too bland. Salmon's a little better than white fish, but it's all just a vehicle for whatever sauce you put on it. Chicken at leasts tastes umami.

That abstract looks completely consistent with the submitted title. I don't see any reason to change it.

If suddenly we had a black box containing a superhuman intelligence and no details about how it worked, then absolutely, we could not control it. For human minds we have something similar, but the box isn't totally black; we've done some neuroscience and psychology to figure out the heuristics and biases it tends to use, how it's easily exploited, etc. And then we have neural networks which duplicate the functioning of some subsystems, and of course our own subjective experience which provides at least a little evidence. It's not enough, but it means that, for example, we can write effective propaganda and advertising.

If we didn't just have the results of scattered tests, but had an exhaustive set of docs written by the creator of the black box, it still wouldn't be easy. But we'd have a chance. This is why one of the main strands of AI value alignment research focuses on building an AI that we can understand. If we can build something we can understand, that gives us leverage to alter it to value our interests.

(What "our interests" are, in a well-specified technical sense, is a whole 'nother problem, and one that there's very little progress on.)

Polls were accurate in both those cases. Media coverage of them was wrong, but the polls were right.

Don't worry. 4chan has already prepared their opposing-British-Orwellian-government outfits.

I didn't read much existing codebases and started doing it myself. I probably stuck with it because vim does visual highlighting of TODO/XXX/FIXME/etc., but I definitely picked it as a searchable "I'm not going to reuse this string of characters" marker.

Another recent update, with a lot of common features: https://austinstartups.com/an-updated-joel-test-for-2017-315...

His list (with its diff):

    -1. Do you use source control?
    +1. Is your source control effective for the disconnected programmer?
     2. Can you make a build in one step?
    -3. Do you make daily builds?
    +3. Do you build, test, and deploy (somewhere) on every commit?
     4. Do you have a bug database?
     5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
    -6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
    +6. Does your source have a stable trunk from which releases can be cut at any time?
    -7. Do you have a spec?
    +7. Can all of a product's features be verified in one step?
    -8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
    +8. Do programmers have access to a door that can be closed for uninterrupted work?
    -9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
    +9. Do programmers have the freedom to choose the best tools for the job?
    -10. Do you have testers?
    +10. Is testing the team's responsibility?
     11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
     12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Not really. The Kochs put some money into the tea party (not ideological libertarians) and some small-government think tanks, but the Libertarian Party and most of the people who'd call themselves libertarians aren't really connected

Precision is totally compatible with deliberate ambiguity and playfulness.

As examples: Esperanto tries very hard to be precise, but there are playful neologisms, like "gedormi", which conjugates "dormi", "to sleep", in the mixed-gender plural, to form "to sleep with (heterosexually)", with the same innuendo as in English.

In Lojban, there is an abundance of poetry in which pieces of the phrases are intentionally and visibly omitted, which allows for flexible interpretation of created ambiguity.

AirBnB has been subject to even more complaints from neighbors and competitors than Uber, though.

Reading what they actually did (or accused of doing, technically), it's not shady at all.

This seems entirely appropriate and not fraud. For a flat rate, you're charged based on a somewhat longer, non-ideal route, rather than the optimal route which you'll take if everything goes well.

I agree that the quiet working environment is still important, and the research that suggested the open office was better has largely been superseded. (Google, who started the trend, has moved away from it.) But this generally provides a much-needed update, and I'm going to put this on my "ask in the phone screen" list.

No, it's working as intended.

In the American political climate, the only people advocating something like traditional liberalism are the libertarians. And libertarianism is, roughly, exaggerated liberalism.

I know personally I identified as a left-libertarian and then realized that classical liberal was a more legible way to express the same positions.

"A breath of fresh sanity"

When in doubt, portmanteau the idiom.