crowdpleaser

I've always wondered if FB could get into the cloud game, it seems like they might have some data center expertise.

However, your comment has me thinking that FB doesn't have a way to lock people to their cloud - they'd be forced to compete on price more than any other major cloud provider. Probably not a great business.

But is Apple a cloud provider? I recall they have some data centers but I thought that it was rumored they used Google Cloud or AWS (or both) too.

You're aware of the history of singapore, right?

Joke alert - it used to be a piracy hub.

Off topic but curious - How do you find events?

>That cookie addict will be paying for your medicare and social security for 30 years, while you pay for their medicare and social security for 5.

Why can't we just pay for our own if we have the means and give those without means basic, cost-effective care for things that can't be solved with lifestyle changes?

And why do I have to be forced into this? Why can't I just chose my relations and affiliations for myself? Besides, bold of you to assume that social security will be there for me when I'm able to retire. That money is gone, I'm not going to see a dime of it - it's just an extra 15% tax on my first 110k.

Pooling risk disincentivizes people from making the changes they need to be healthier. And people not bearing the full cost of their decisions makes it easier for them to displace the negative consequences of their choices on others.

I bust my hump in the gym a few days every week because I want to age well - I make an effort to eat healthy food and now I gotta pay for an cookie addict who would rather slurp down medication than make lifestyle changes? Screw that.

I made my choices, I can live with them. Others make their choices, they get to live with their choices. If they get to take good stuff from me to support their bad choices, I expect some reciprocation.

A motorcycle isn't much more cost-effective to run than an economy car but a motorcycle has huge performance advantages and radically better / cheaper parking options.

The emissions are worse, but not worse than older cars that are still legal to drive.

As a recent transplant to the bay area, I'm surprised so few people ride motorcycles - I know that it's not tenable for parents and people with medical conditions, but there are so many people here who could.

I cut my commute time in half, I got a lightly used motorcycle + gear for less than the price of a used Prius, I get mileage that's comparable to an economy car and performance that rivals that of a performance car.

Heck, I even took it to Los Angeles and back over the New Year's and I was surprised at how comfortable I was for the entire trip despite doing ~90 mph in 45 degree weather. In particular, my back would be uncomfortable if I had spent 6 hours in the car, but 6 hours on the bike was great.

It's just so cool that a machine that works so well in congested cities can also work so well on the open road. It's not like driving a large sedan or SUV - where the open road is a joy but city driving is terrible. If we could just get 25% of people out of cars and into motorcycles, we could reduce congestion dramatically - https://newatlas.com/motorcycles-reduce-congestion/21420/

Historically the anti-monopoly laws in America could be deployed to against monopsony or the accumulation of power to act as a monopsony.

However, American Businesses successfully lobbied to change the ways the anti-monopoly laws are used - now the anti-monopoly laws are focused primarily on avoiding consumer price increases and are blind to things like accumulating power to be an abusive monopoly (a la Amazon) or monopsony.

Save the planet from what? A few degrees celsius warmer weather and extreme weather events?

It's not as if we're going to wind up with an inhabitable planet if we keep burning fossil fuels.

I don't disagree that people use words in ways that don't match up with their use in science. However, when people are criticizing science, it'd be helpful if rendered their argument in language that obfuscates important distinctions.

But our 'fitness functions' for social problems are normally pretty good or above reproach of the model. These tend to be easy to measure like 'did the person skip bail?'

If a model of 'likelihood to show up to court after making bail' can make better predictions with information about protected characteristics (e.g if the model used sex to predict likelihood to show up in court), that feature would reduce the bias of the model.

I think the issue progressives have with 'bias' is that some of society's prejudices ('bias') have an evidentiary basis. We already make decisions that progressives would tell us are prejudiced but we probably want to use those prejudices if they're useful.

Consider a group of young men standing outside of a Church. If they're all clean shaven, smiling, and 'appropriate' for the Church it's nothing concerning. If they're white guys with shaved heads / neo nazi haircuts, and they don't look nice, and they're standing outside of a black Church, the prejudiced among us might correctly decide to alert the authorities to it.

My personal opinion is that we should allow models to consider protected traits but we should ensure that models that make important decisions aren't prejudiced along those protected traits. The way to measure this is simply to ensure that the accuracy and precision of the classification decisions are comparable among protected traits.

I really wish people would at least skim the wikipedia page to figure out the vocabulary of the field they're about to opine on.

The left-progressive use of the word 'bias' is completely different than the way statisticians use the word.

If bias increases accuracy/precision, it's not bias.

The more interesting question is this - is it permissible for models to consider protected characteristics if those characteristics improve the performance of the model?

Agree with the caveat that it's a recruiting problem not an interviewing problem.

I'm a data scientist and every firm I've ever interviewed with has told me about how important analytics is to them, how they take it seriously, how they're investing so much in it, etc. But the recruiters are amazingly incompetent and shockingly bad at getting their details right - I know there's a reason that the recruiters aren't data scientists themselves but I've terminated my candidacy at places off of phone screens because of such poor experiences with the recruiter.

My favorite vignette comes from interviewing for a machine learning position. The recruiter asked me what software I used, I told her that I was more familiar with tensorflow than PyTorch but was familiar with both and prefered to use Keras as the interface to both when dealing with structured data. She wasn't familiar with any of those packages and went on to quiz me about the SAS procedures I was familiar with.

I sometimes think of quitting my job and becoming a head hunter / recruiter. I don't think I'd be good at it, but willingness to use emails rather than phone calls and familiarity with the tech stack has to be a major differentiator, right?

>A lot of people in engineering went down that path because they were inspired by someone when they were younger. If there were more women and minorities in engineering, then other (young) women and minorities would be able to see them as role models and follow suit.

This is really interesting claim and perhaps somewhat biased. Some preliminary testing of VR teachers suggests that young women prefer to be taught by women, and boys have a preference for robots/drones.

My own personal experience is that mecha anime got me inspired to work in STEM, I can see why that might not have universal appeal, but the claim that people need role models who look like them isn't universal.

source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190108095108.h...

This headline is extremely non-specific. Wasn't James Damore also harassed over views on diversity?

Alright, but the structural problems are upstream of recruiting and promotions. It's simply bad engineering to try to solve the problem downstream rather than at the root.

Historically the American Cars and SUVs were different enough that it would be untenable to make them side by side. It's gotten better since the SUVs became more car-like, but they haven't invested in modularity like the Japanese automakers, sometimes the companies blame unions for the inflexibility, but I think that's a red herring. However, it may be the case that the unions make it expensive enough to build modular lines that it's just not worth pursuing.

It's not affecting foreign automakers nearly as much for two reasons:

The Japanese automakers have really worked hard to make their manufacturing lines (and vehicle designs) modular (a line that makes Camrys on Monday can make RAV4s on Tuesday), the foreign automakers' sedan sales didn't slip nearly as badly as the domestic automakers did so a lot of their plants/lines are still profitable to operate, and the US has always been uniquely interested in trucks and SUVs so many of the foreign-owned plants here were already optimized for SUVs (e.g the BMW plant in America has made SUVs since its inception).