condercet

you might google “computational social justice” or “computational social choice” for some political science grounded in math and computer science

I think the recent metaverse push is well compared with a certain search company’s attempt to become a social network.

The conclusion of the study you linked seems to paint a slightly more complicated picture:

"We found evidence that between-district racial segregation is associated with racial disparities in school district spending, while between-district racial socioeconomic segregation is not. We find that as Black–White racial segregation increases over time, total per pupil expenditures and other per pupil expenditures shift in ways that disfavor the typical Black student’s district relative to the typical White student’s district."

It is not fair to place the blame for this epidemic of violence squarely on those suffering from mental health issues.

Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.

People who suffer from mental health issues are tremendously more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrators. These individuals already suffer from tremendous discrimination and hardships in their lives.

Those who would place the blame in this direction while deflecting from the ease of access to firearms are acting disingenuously.

We continue to do nothing, and I wish I could say that nothing continues to happen - but Americans continue to die from this senseless violence with shocking regularity.

This attitude is terrible and exploitative. Employee's have a duty of fidelity and good faith to their employer, sure - but highly skilled and in-demand engineers should demand better of their employees.

It seems like for this to be successful you'd want access to engagement/conversion data to train your model on. Google / Facebook would be positioned to execute on that, others less so.

Another 72% here.

I had the displeasure of working for a company that had a similar review system, but it was quarterly rather than annual. Total nightmare.

so that slideshow I linked was probably written by an intern or something - but here's a serious analysis of the tech dated 1999 from DTSO (australian army) that states: "There are no apparent technological barriers to the successful design, manufacture and operation of WIG craft"

"http://www.seaphantom.com/pdf/MILITARY_ANALYSIS_WIG_AIRCRAFT...

Could you build a passenger version of this and run it up and down the west coast? (or trans-pacific?) Sounds like a "speeder" from Star Wars!

NASA (or atleast someone affiliated with NASA) seems to think there's some potential! https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/IF...

The last slide shares conclusions: "Commercial ground effect planes will lead to more fuel efficient trans-oceanic flights. • Cheaper flights. • More accessible. • Less pollution. • Revolutionize aviation design."

"CEO of horizontally integrated monopolistic anticompetitive conglomerate denounces competitor as monopolistic"

Mozilla has decided to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as a business strategy.

Social skills are skills that can be improved upon like any other. A good place to start would be seeing if there are improv classes near you.

This is rapidly becoming the case in the US as well.

There are several more instances of Google promoting their own services above the SERP (and competitors).

1. Shopping. Google got in big trouble with the EU about this recently.

2. Job listings. Google launched a jobs product and promoted it above the SERP, damaging Glassdoor / Indeed etc.

Providing the largest source of traffic (via google search) and competing in industries that depend on that traffic is an inherent conflict of interest.

Thanks for being here, and for all the work you put into educational materials. As easy as it is to hate on "coding 4 kids" products, it's a real under-served niche that has the potential to do a lot of good in the world.

Despite the proliferation of electronics and software, the generation of kids growing up today doesn't have the same access to the underlying machine that we took for granted. I don't think any 8 year-olds are getting root access to their iPhones and installing terminal emulators...

It seems tempting to say that the quality of life in most of Europe is much higher than in the US. There's a decent chance this is a case of "the grass is greener" syndrome, but still.

Higher quality food, 4+ weeks of vacation, working weeks <40 hours, easier access to arts and culture, and significantly less income inequality and economic strife (not counting southern Europe here). Not to mention the lack of regularly occurring mass shootings.

On the other hand, if you're working in tech, the US is definitely the place to be. Salaries are significantly higher, while the costs of goods and services (excluding sandwiches and rent in the bay area) are much cheaper.

For people who've lived and worked on both continents, what are your thoughts?

You are misinformed and pushing an unproductive narrative. From the Center of Disease Control: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html

"Drug overdose deaths continue to increase in the United States. From 1999 to 2017, more than 702,000 people have died from a drug overdose. In 2017, more than 70,000 people died from drug overdoses, making it a leading cause of injury-related death in the United States. Of those deaths, almost 68% involved a prescription or illicit opioid."

Pain management may be a problem, but the opioid epidemic is very real.

Certainly, as a future applicant to grad school, these revelations make me dramatically less likely to consider the Media Lab.

Yes, perl6 does a lot of things right. It's a great language and ecosystem that deserves more adoption.

But all the things the parent comment listed, particularly branding, are in my mind part of developer ergonomics. And there is room for improvement. They wouldn't be talking about renaming the language if this wasn't the case.

This is a good list. The default user experience for Perl 6 needs to be dramatically improved.

Developer ergonomics matter! Yes, when you run 'python' you get cpython, and Java is probably hotspot vm or openjdk or something (but Java is not a good example of developer ergonomics).

Rust is one of the best examples here -- adoption is being driven by the ease-of-use of the entire toolchain, including the package manager and things as small as human readable compiler errors.

I'm scared and feel totally powerless. Everyone around me who I've talked to about this either feels the same or thinks its a complete hoax.

The whole habitable planet thing was nice while it lasted.

But seriously, does anyone have any suggestions on how a software engineer can make any sort of meaningful impact on this? Or even groups of software engineers, as many of the people here feel similarly. This is a problem that must be solved.

I imagine a ridesharing / uber-like model will be dominant compared to private ownership and personal piloting. But these things are going to be incredibly annoying and disruptive -- the various drone delivery efforts already seem loud and stress-inducing. I imagine airspace restrictions on these are going to become common in the near-ish future.

Okay, then let's talk about the protester's novel tactics and use of technology to coordinate a distributed, leaderless protest.

That seems like it should be fair game.

It should be noted that YCombinator does business in China. They may have incentives to limit criticism of China on this forum. They announced YC China in August 2018, and nothing indicates that it has been shut down since then.

While there is a lot of great work in high tech and startups coming out of China, we (and the people who run this site) should be clearheaded: there is no significant distinction between the military and industry in China. Cooperation with China comes at a cost that will, eventually, be paid.

Not to say that HN is actively filtering out China-critical posts. But they easily could in the future.

On the contrary, many of the people I've met who most definitely do not have first world problems -- people living in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other destitute parts of the world -- often seem to lead genuinely happier lives than the stressed out existence that is the norm in the US.

Being able to have a cheeseburger delivered on demand does not make up for systematic loneliness and dehumanization. The more I travel, the more perspective I get, the more I think that things have gone deeply wrong here.

Mozilla's integration with Pocket is at direct conflict with their values: "Internet for people, not profit". I expected better of them.

Credit to frgtpsswrdlame for surfacing this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934367

yup, I dropped a 0 there. Should be 1/100.

"evidence presented to support this is very thin"

Autonomous cars are on the roads today. They're a ways off from serving as reliable truckers or taxis, but that's in our future. We're seeing rapid advancements in machine learning, especially in computer vision and abstract strategy games.

Trucking alone accounts for 5% of the US GDP [1], and employs 1.7 million Americans annually [2]. That's about 1/10 of the total US workforce. Taxi drivers and support staff for trucking are smaller occupations that are also at risk. What happens if all those jobs disappear overnight?

Hopefully the people in those jobs will successfully transition to other careers, as many did after the industrial revolution. But it might not be pretty in the short-term. I don't think it's irrational to be concerned about this.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucking_industry_in_the_Unite...

2. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes533032.htm

aside: Wikipedia has some nice graphs, but shouldn't be considered reliable. What's the best source of economic and labor data in the US (or other advanced economies), aside from Bureau of Labor Statistics?