budde

Yeah, this is really, really far from an apples-to-apples comparison. First of, the test dataset size is trivially small for usecases where big data systems are typically applied. I don't know why you'd introduce all the complexity and overhead of a distributed mapreduce framework to ETL a dataset that would fit in memory on consumer-grade hardware. It's not exactly fair to compare a framework running on a single node to one where you've artificially introduced multiple nodes and network overhead for a dataset that would easily fit on one. You'll also notice a pretty stark difference between the level of detail provided for the BlazingSQL test set up and the Spark one, which (unless I'm missing something) is lacking any code or configuration details. I've dipped my toes in the big data space long enough and seen enough "${FANCY NEW FRAMEWORK} beats ${INDUSTRY-STANDARD FRAMEWORK} by 123x!!" posts to recognize this as a gigantic red flag. How you manage partition sizes, order and choice of operations, and tuning parameters can make orders-of-magnitude level differences to your performance.

Maybe the future of frameworks like this will be on the GPU. I'm just not seeing any evidence of it yet. Right now, Spark fills the space where you can throw globs of memory at TB- to PB-scale problems. I could very well be wrong, but I don't see how this is going to be cost-effective on GPUs given the current cost of memory there.

And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.

He provides no evidence to back the conclusions he draws from that data though. It reminds me of some articles or posts you might see briefly gain traction on the internet where the author starts from a point backed by one or two reputable sources and proceeds to use those references to back an argument that lies well outside the bounds of the original data.

As one of the authors of a paper cited in the memo puts it:

In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large [1]

[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

What business does this guy have deciding what does or doesn't empower women in tech? Where is his evidence or personal experience here? I'm certainly no expert in this area, but couldn't it be better listen to the opinions of women in tech, disturbingly many of whom who have publicly shared stories of sexism or harassment directly limiting their career potential in tech, about whether they feel underrepresented because of interpersonal culture or because of their biology?

He may have not told his direct teammates they lowered the bar but he certainly implied that women and underrepresented groups have at a whole at Google:

The Harm of Google’s biases:

...

- A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates

...

- Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.

Do you really not see the concerns this engineer has introduced for Google over his ability to objectively judge his peers who are women or members of an underrepresented group or at least how such coworkers might now have these concerns if they find themselves working with him? Do you not see how the long-term detriment and risk to Google could be (substantially) greater than the value the engineer brings to the company? Even if you remove the high-mindedness and virtues that tech companies like to project in their PR, do you not see how this is the only rational business choice for a Fortune 50 company?

And listed data and studies to back up his claim. That it is controversial, does not mean it isn't true, and you haven't refuted it, simply stated it as if on it's face should have been grounds for dismissal.

He listed references that indicate, when viewed broadly, that men and women can exhibit different observable personality characteristics. That was not the argument of his memo. His argument was that, because of this broadly measurable difference, this leads to women being less interested in computer science (although not to the degree of similar STEM fields, oddly enough!) and therefore he shouldn't have to be subjected to bias training or be burdened with any other sort of program that suggests maybe, perhaps, potentially the social culture in tech/SV could be exacerbating this.

All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.

Did the thought police make this guy write and publish a work memo suggesting some women are too neurotic to be software engineers?

No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.

How about don't write a company-wide memo that insinuates some of your coworkers aren't there by merit because they don't have the biological composition to stomach the job? It's not like somebody was having a conversation with this guy in the break room, asked his opinion on diversity and ran to the press to start a witch hunt against some random Google engineer.

fired from a tech company for "perpetuating gender stereotypes"...

Fired from a tech company for publishing a company-wide memo insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do and suggesting that some subset of them haven't achieved their position based on merit.

There has been absolutely zero concrete evidence presented that indicates it was Seth Rich. I fail to see how this is anything more than a conspiracy theory being promoted by members of the right wing media in order to distract from the current political attacks against Trump at the expense of the family of a man who was senselessly murdered.

Steve Jobs was brilliant at coming up with new products

By my count, Jobs shepherded the following hit products (I'm giving the Apple ][ to Woz):

- Macintosh (1984)

- iPod (2001)

- iPhone (2007)

- iPad (2010)

I think you're exaggerating how often Apple rolled out new product lines under Jobs. You could even argue that the iPod and iPhone overshadow the other two substantially in terms of cultural impact.

Their only option now is to start creating variations of existing product lines to keep them "fresh".

Isn't this kind of what you'd expect out of a business? Refreshing and supporting their existing product lines while occasionally trying to establish new ones? The iPhone is looking more and more like a once-in-a-lifetime home run product (Ben Thompson has done a lot of good writing on this), the likes of which Apple (or anybody else, for that matter) may never be able to top. This isn't to say that Apple doesn't miss having a visionary like Jobs at the helm or that their product lineup doesn't have glaring flaws. I just think the massive success of the iPhone set expectations way too high.

The most concerning thing to me is that after recognizing the parallels between the Trump campaign and the Silicon Valley ethos Altman's response wasn't to be introspective and consider if SV culture has been too boorish but rather to (seemingly) pay compliment to Trump's craftiness.

Both Facebook Messenger & WeChat has no integration to iOS 10 CallKit and Siri

Messenger has had CallKit integration for quite a while now.

As a user, I trust Apple far more with push notifications than I would a third party.

Yes, there's an argument that there is very little user benefit from having multiple push notification services. But there's no inherent benefit to having Apple's service be the one-and-only service ever allowed to be used -- that's not an opinion, that's vendor lock-in.

Let's suppose Apple were to open up their APIs to allow other services to send push notifications to their devices. Since they are no longer the intermediary they've given up control on how often a developer's servers are sending notifications via the third party, they've lost a control on throttling how often notifications are sent to devices. What happens if the push service or the developer's backend is compromised (or misconfigured) and attempts to send hundreds of push notifications per second to thousands of phones? Features could be added to the OS to help mitigate this but the phone must still service the incoming traffic. Strictly speaking, this isn't Apple's fault but this won't be a sufficient answer for their customers.

Which isn't even considering that they need to figure out a secure mechanism for allowing third parties to uniquely identify iPhones.

There's an argument that there is benefit in not having multiple different web browsers on a user's phone. But there's no benefit to having Apple's webkit be the one-and-only web browser ever allowed on the phone -- that's not opinion, that's vendor lock-in.

What happens if Mozilla, Google, etc. release a new browser engine for iOS with all the latest whizz-bang HTML features but at the cost of doubling power consumption? Apple support needs to deal with the customers who suddenly see their battery life plummet when switching to a new browser. 99 customers out of 100 will blame Apple for this. What if a vulnerability allowing RCE is discovered in the JIT code included in the third party browser? Apple has lost control of the patching cycle and their only recourse would be to remotely remove the browsers from their customers' phones if the vendor does not update the app in an acceptable timeframe.

I feel like a lot of Apple's decisions around the iOS ecosystem can be explained by looking at the problems they had with customers running Adobe Flash on the Mac.

As a macOS user, I'm pretty pleased Apple is discouraging the use of the Touch Bar as yet more real estate for 'innovative' developers to plaster unwanted notifications or other distracting garbage. Besides, if you have a compelling non-approved use of the touch bar nothing is stopping you from distributing it outside of the Mac App Store.

Now if only they could take a look at the user-hostile default "allow" option on the dialog Safari presents when a website wants to start sending you push notifications...

Doesn't holding down the "fn" key bring them all back though?

I will never for the life of me understand why pointing out that some people have been fortunate to have an easier path in life than others is so offensive to some folks. I think people see it as a way to try to diminish what some have accomplished rather than trying to shine light on the inequality that exists in society.

Additionally, "social justice warrior" is truly a pejorative that says more about the person using it than its target.

The Puget Sound population is actually 4.2 million as of 2012 [1], assuredly a bit larger now. I'd call it a moderately-large metro area.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_region

Setting aside personal preference and the vast differences in play between the two sports, you also need to consider the number of games played in a season. An NFL team plays 16 games in the regular season. An MLB team plays 162. While a baseball game and a football game may be similar in duration and proportion of action to dead time, a football game carries much more weight and I think this contributes to the relative popularity of the sport over baseball.

Yes, because helping people is just the worst.

I can't help but think that they should've done this 2 years ago. While it's true that this could have accelerated the exodus of users from BB to iOS/Android, I think a cross-platform, successful BBM would've been an invaluable beachhead in the mobile environment for RIM as their device marketshare plummeted. BBM could have then served as means of keeping users who gave up their BlackBerries in the BB ecosystem and helped to attract these users back to the BB platform when their latest, more modern devices were released.

At this point, at least among young people, I feel most former BBM users may have simply moved on and the prospect of using BBM on their new devices may just not be an interesting one anymore. Perhaps I'm wrong about this, though. Regardless, I think it's a good choice on RIM's part to launch a multiplatform BBM, I just feel like it would've been much more valuable to have done it a lot sooner.

I would think that the partners at Google Ventures who spent weeks interviewing and vetting (and ultimately hiring) Siegler would have a much better idea of his qualifications for working in this space than you would.

> Within two months, Allegra was given an internship at Apple. But just over a year later, Allegra says he was suddenly let go for failing to respond to an email that would have extended his employment.

To me, this doesn't read like he was "let go" at all from Apple. It seems like they extended him an offer to come back for another internship, which he failed to respond to in a timely fashion. Deadlines like this are given because departments need to determine their itern headcount for a summer so they can extend offers and allocate funds accordingly.

Maybe if we ignore these issues, they'll just go away...

Men are not an underrepresented group in tech. It is not at all the same situation. Do you really not see that?

PyLadies is not a female-exclusive group, and even if it were, there's a big difference between a group meant to advocate for and affirm an underrepresented group in the tech space and one that reinforces the attitudes that have led to that underrepresentation in the first place.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from passing a law that abridges or censors your right to speak publicly. It does not grant you the absolute right to say whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want, free of consequence.

Yeah, Apple really should be more attentive to enterprise needs rather than burdening IT departments with deploying annoying 0-day vulnerability patches. The quick adoption of this patch only highlights how intractable Apple's update process is for enterprise. /s