HN user
To be honest I think you should go ahead and delete that account (and this, my main). Upon further reflection I think my engagement with HN has become unhealthy.
Hydroelectric storage is geographically dependent. You need the right topography and access to water. Likewise, hydroelectric storage takes a long time to build.
And then we'd have to continue that production for two and a half decades to get to 1 day of storage. And we'd also have to drastically increase our battery recycling capacity to match (remember most lithium ion batteries last 1000-2000 cycles).
The cause is that more people moved into the city than there were housing units constructed. It isn't an either-or question, it's both. San Francisco has more demand than supply precisely because an insufficient number of housing units were constructed relative to the rising population. Had the city built sufficient units to accommodate the new residents there would be no shortage of supply. Had there been no influx of residents there wouldn't be either. But we can't just outlaw people from moving into the city, so the solution is to increase the supply of housing. And NIMBYism is a big obstacle in increasing the supply of housing.
The factor that drives up price for grid level storage is scale. Only ~300 GWh worth of batteries is produced globally each year. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity each hour. If anyone tries to install battery storage at a significant scale, demand will vastly outstrip supply and drive prices up.
Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc.
Realistically we should saturate daytime energy demand with solar, and if there aren't any scalable storage options by then switch gears and proceed with hydroelectric where it's viable and nuclear where it's not.
I think you're taking the response a very narrow set of people have to this dynamic and assuming a substantial contingent of readers are sharing this response. When I discuss the observations made in the original post with people, the overwhelming response is "of course" without a hint of controversy.
If you're not well equipped to refute the claim, why do you feel equipped to call it horrible, a conspiracy theory, and a harm to society? The notion that women are more selective than men is something I consider neither harmful, nor particularly far fetched.
This output of this kind of test is determined by the order in which the categories are presented. Put male on the left and humanities on the right first, then put male and science simultaneously on the left side and it will produce the opposite result: men associated with liberal arts and women with science.
It didn't just ask about censoring specific words or terms, or staying polite. It asked about censoring beliefs.
Say someone who is very much in favor of legal abortion stays silent as one of their co-workers goes on about how abortion should be banned, for fear of offending said co-worker. Is the fact that this person held back from sharing their beliefs an example of inclusivity? I'd say that this is not only false, it is the opposite of what is true. The fact that this person self-censored out of fear of causing offense is evidence of an environment intolerant of pro-choice people.
Inclusivity is a worthwhile goal. That is why such extensive self-censoring beliefs is a prominent concern, it's strong evidence that we are not being inclusive of people of different beliefs.
There are so many literary authors that aren't white men, that arguing that he should have the right to decide to only teach works from white men (if he deems them to be the best works), does seem to me like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people.
No, it does not remotely seem like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people. How do you go from "I should be able to decide to only teach works from white men" to "other people shouldn't teach anyone other than white men"? To go from "I should be allowed to _____" to "nobody should do anything except ______" is a massive leap.
A course in classics is going to have overwhelmingly male authors, likely exclusively so. The reality of the ancient Mediterranean was that patriarchy was extensive, and women were not afforded the opportunity to contribute in that space. This is in now way saying that other courses in other fields should feature women or minority authors.
I know a lot of people (mostly white, mostly men) don't think that's true, but these types of attitudes can easily allow harmful messages to fester in academic classrooms.
88 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “the climate on my campus prevents students/faculty from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Sixty-three percent of faculty agreed or strongly agreed with the same statement.
No, it's not mostly white men, 88% is a figure large enough that it necessarily includes large swathes of other demographics.
Google certainly has more monetary resources. But in my experience large companies like Google are the ones that can't afford to do something like this. The logistical benefits of white-boarding interviews and the accountability gains are much more important to large companies. This interview process was for a smaller company.
But you're absolutely correct that the more time-consuming the interview process is for the candidate, the more likely they'll interview somewhere else. In fact, that's exactly what I did: I received an offer partway through this git-based interview process, and the offer was good enough that I didn't see value in completing it.
First a note on how to read the relevant study. The link to the study in the WSJ article is paywalled. This is a non-paywalled link [1] is the results [2]. 22 applicants solved a problem alone, 26 with a proctor present. Without the proctor present about 2/3rds passed, with the proctor present 1/2 passed. Using score >= 2 as "passing", 12 out of 16 men passed in private and 4 out of 4 women. 11 our of 20 men passed with the proctor, and 0 out of 6 women. The methodology looks robust, but especially with the claims with respect to gender I'd want to see a sample size larger than the single digits before making any generalizations.
With that aside, my broader thoughts on tech interview processes: Companies want an interview process that are,
- Successfully distinguishes between people that have the knowledge and abilities required to perform the job.
- Has systems on accountability, consistency.
- Is relatively easy to train employees to administer the interview.
- Has a relatively low time-commitment for everyone involved, both interviewer and candidate.
In reality, though, there are tradeoffs between each of these points. For instance, using a set question bank improves consistency and accountability. Rubrics can be more explicitly defined, and bias limited. But it means candidates can google for questions beforehand. This was a salient issue when I worked at Dropbox, there were only about a dozen technical. interview questions for a 2,500+ person company. Having developers come up with their own unique question helps mitigate this, but reduces accountability.
Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more closely approximate real working conditions. One company's interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with tasks spread out over a week. After building the first solution, the interview came back with further feature requests and comments on the first iteration. This tested the candidate's ability to refactor existing solutions to meet changing tasks, and the ability to integrate feedback. These are things that are rarely captured by whiteboard interviews, but are arguably some of the more important skills in software development. But on the flip side, it was much more time-consuming in aggregate than 4 hour-long interviews.
No one interview process has all the advantages. I think a lot of companies settle into a pattern of 1 or 2 remote technical screens followed by a circuit 3-4 hour-long interviews because it's logistically robust. It's a format candidates are familiar with. It's easy to train new employees to conduct these interviews, and there's broad enough set of people participating that one biased signal isn't going to be decisive.
Companies could also drop problem-solving tests as currently offered and instead ask candidates to spend five minutes explaining how they would perform a particular job-related task, Dr. Parnin says. Focusing on communication skills in this way, Dr. Parnin says, can reveal how a candidate thinks.
But do we want to hire the candidate that can talk about high level ideas for five minutes in a convincing manner, but can't code Fizz Buzz? Or a binary search? I get that some people might stumble due to pressure, but at the end of the day if you need some mechanism to determine if the candidate has the required skills or not. And administering a test is an effective way of doing this.
This isn't the first time articles like these have been written. X group is disadvantaged by problem-solving tests, so don't use said tests. But how then do you determine whether or not the candidate has the required skills? Usually whatever supplants the technical interviews are also subject to unfairness: referrals, recruiting alumni from specific universities or companies. While far from perfect, I still have trouble seeing what could replace problem-based tasks as a means of demonstrating skills.
I think it's hard to argue that th Fallout 3 formula was more popular than the New Vegas formula. I enjoyed obsidian's take on the fallout setting, but it's hard to deny that Bethesda's was better received.
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cottage
Plenty of women have told me they don't think "guys" is gendered at all. Most (all?) of the women in my office use it irrespective of gender.
Maybe it's because you're asserting your anecdotal experience as truth, when it's not at all representative of most other people's experience.
It wasn't very misleading. Giving an ultimatum on threat of resignation is more or less entails giving your resignation if the company doesn't accept. My understanding is that the conversation more or less went:
Gebru: "Don't make me retract the paper and give me the names of the reviewers or I'll resign."
Google: "We're not doing that. We accept and respect your decision to resign from Google."
Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s.
The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants
I'm sure you're eager to talk about how thermal storage, or concret weights with pulleys, or compressed air is going to be 100x better than current solutions. But until those things move out to prototypes and I to mass production, they represent potential solutions not actual solutions. Like fusion. If the next attempt at fusion works, great! But building out infrastructure assuming it's going to work is extremely unwise.
To put this in comparison, a solar farm would need 50,000 to 100,000 acres to match the net output of those nuclear plants. Plus the land used for energy storage, which would typically involve damming rivers which has its own set of ecological effects.
And it's possible to build much denser plants. The Shin-Kori facility in Korea is massive energy relative to the land it uses. Nuclear power is far more energy dense than solar or wind. This is just thermodynamic fact.
Nuclear's non-intermittency is why it wind in the long run. Once intermittent sources fulfill demand during peak production hours, the actual cost of adding each usable watt goes up dramatically. If your goal is to run a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables that's fine. That's what Germany is doing.
But if your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions, you need to factor in the cost of storage. And there really no feasible plan of storing the amount of energy required at the moment.
If your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions, nuclear presents a much more realistic option. We keep celebrating Germany, but in reality their carbon emissions per KWh of electricity is not actually very good. It is worse than Britain. And it's ~7x worse than it's neighborhood to the west, which we tend to ignore for some reason.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
You're overstating the cost of waste storage by two orders of magnitude. It's sealed into concrete cylinders. This doesn't look very haphazard to me: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Nuclear_...
New leadership prompting a 5-10x increase in valuation? Dubious. And Robinhood didn't shut down trading at $40. They shut it down in the $300-$400 range. To be frank, anyone that thought this price was driven by people who genuinely thought gamestop was worth that much is just willful ignorance.
There was no good option for Robinhood. Keep trading open? Be complicit in a pump and dump. A pump and dump that may be legal by virtue of the fact that it's decentralized, but it's still a pump and dump and Robinhood probably doesn't want to take it's chances. Ban both buy and sales, and people lose money because they can't sell their positions. This is worse. Doing what they did was the best option. Not a good option, and one that still left a lot of people unhappy. Sometimes the best option is still a bad option, it's just the least-bad option.
Bitcoin, and decentralized currencies in general, are a novel thing. They absolutely do have utility, especially when it comes to circumventing government asset transfer controls. Plus, there's a fixed amount of bitcoin that will ever be available. And we're already close to that limit, 80-90% there.
Tesla is a pioneer in the electric vehicles industry. It's in a particularly good position to profit from decarbonization movements.
Gamestop is neither of these things. It's a brick and mortar store that was being made obsolete by digital distribution, and even more so from coronavirus.
Should pump and dumps be legal? That's just reading bits of paper based on people's views of how valuable they are. But nobody serious doubts that pump and dumps schemes are justifiably banned. Yes people should mostly be free to buy and trade as they see fit. But some people are willing to act in bad faith to exploit others.
Was Gamestop's meteoric rise a pump and dump? In part it was a short squeeze, but it also had all the hallmarks of a pump and dump. We keep saying that it was a bunch of internet people getting rich off hedge funds. But the people who were actually getting screwed were the ones who bought in at $100+ a share and lost over half their money. Nobody was ever under any illusion that the stock would remotely stay this high, and people were just hoping to get lucky and sell right before the crash. This isn't the kind of behavior someone wants in the stock market.
I didn't know about any liquidity issues. But of that's the case then yeah, this is just regulatory limits kicking in. Though one could make the argument that they should have banned the sale of all stocks, not just GME, AMC, and other stocks targeted by the reddit short squeeze.
I mean, I honestly don't really blame Robinhood's leadership here. This is incompetence, by virtue of having no solid precedent or guidance on what is the right thing to do here.
Gamestop's stock rise was unambiguous market manipulation. Sure, the difference between a single actor driving up a stock and a bunch of random people on the internet doing it is significant. But what isn't ambiguous is that GameStop stock wasn't worth nearly 400 dollars, and whatever was going on was fishy. Maybe this legal because of the decentralized nature of the manipulation, but this was likely unclear at the time. It still seems unclear to this day.
If Robinhood continued to allow trades then they could be accused of being complicit in market manipulation. This was probably unacceptable to them. If they banned buying and selling GME then they'd have shitloads if pissed customers who lost money because Robinhood didn't let them sell. So prohibiting buys but not sales seems like the least-bad action. Yes, it has the effect of downward pressure on the stock. But all of the alternatives were worse.
What is their dubious place in history? Google created the first effective programmatically curated search engine. Facebook created en extremely popular social network. These companies were founded when the internet was still relatively nascent, and norms over privacy were yet to be established and that led to subsequent controversy. But to compare these to the Dutch and British East India Companies is laughable. Those companies literally had standing armies and conducted colonial wars. Some even go as far as to say that they perpetrated genocide. The British East India company starved 2-10 million Bengalis. Facebook chat was used to coordinate the killing of 25,000 to 100,000 Rohyngi, by virtue of ineffectual moderation and lack of tooling and personnel to police Burmese language content. The notion that this has any level of equivalency of a company that actually had soldiers shooting people is absurd.
And users do indeed have a choice. I don't use Facebook, and I use duck duck go for search (and Bing for video search). These are not utilities. Alternatives exist, and the use of these services aren't even necessary in the first place.
I'm really not seeing justification for your characterization of the situation. A website is being charged for links to news articles. They don't want to pay for this content, so they aren't going to host this content.
Calling this blackmail seems hyperbolic. Australia is imposing a tax on serving links to Australians, so Facebook is no longer serving those links. If the US imposes a tariff on BMWs and BMW stops selling cars in the US is it blackmail? This is the same deal with Google News in Spain. Spain imposed a tax, so Google stopped doing business there (at least insofar as Google News is concerned).
This isn't blackmail any more than I'm blackmailing my local coffee shop when I go elsewhere when they jack up the prices. Increase the cost of doing business and people are less likely to want to do business. What is surprising or nefarious about this?
A boycott is when consumers protest an organization by refusing to do business with them. Typically this is done to try an effect a change in behavior or policy in said organization.
Cancel culture usually targets an individual. The objective is typically not change in policy, but the ostracism of the target.
E.g. refusing to buy from Nike until they pay better wages to their manufacturing labor is a boycott. Pressuring a company to fire a certain employee because a group doesn't like the political views of said employee is cancel culture.
I have concluded that there's a fundamental conflict of interest between "mainstream" media like the New York Times and tech companies and people related to them. The former and the latter are competitors in the attention economy, and this manifests in substantial negative bias. I have observed this since the mid 2010s at least.