el_cujo

This is kind of a touchy subject. I feel like a lot of people would balk at the idea of the top 1% not doing better and better, not because they have any extra insight into the topic but because to say this seems like you're defending the ultra-rich (and by extension attacking everyone else). In reality, even if the rich aren't getting even richer at quite the rate we thought, it doesn't mean you really need to have any more sympathy for them, it just means you tweak a few lines of your rhetoric.

This is exactly the type of thing you have PR people on staff to write though?

I wonder if this will result in any big changes at Google or is just codifying the way things have been run for a while.

From my memory, "tl;dr" used to be a response to a long post that was supposed to be an insult, like "do you really expect me to read all of that crap?". Then it morphed into it's current usage where people would try to cut off this criticism by adding a short version of a post for people who would consider it too long to read, thus marked as "tl;dr".

I found it surprising that Hawaii was chosen for the first expansion. Maybe someone looking for an excuse to take a trip?

And now people who want to convince others to leave behind their fitbits need only point them to this article to lend legitimacy to the claim that "everyone is doing it!". Stuff like this is part of why people don't trust the media anymore.

I like the idea of these tiny computers, but really anything with a blackberry-style thumb keyboard is just a non-starter for me. It looks cool, but if I sit and think about actually using it for even a second I know I wouldn't like it. It's a shame I don't see more of these kinds of products that utilize a foldout keyboard like the thinkpad 701C and instead roll with the thumb keyboard, but then again maybe the moving parts of having the pop-out bits is failure-prone and not worth doing either.

>Just because you’re not a fan of it doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid solution for the rest of us.

Leaving out USB-A ports isn't a solution for you though, it's just a limitation that affects some people but not you.

>And the rest of us mostly like having change forced on us — it means we’re progressing forward instead of shouting at clouds for being in the way of the sun.

This just stinks of fanboyism, any time Apple makes a big hardware change like removing the headphone jack from iPhones, it's mostly negative voices disliking the change. The heat eventually dies down and people adapt, but it's revisionist history to imply people like having the change forced on them at the time.

I remember at the time of its release, social media was pretty monolithic as well. All of my friends at the time thought it was a joke that the search engine company was trying to ape Facebook. Twitter was big, sure, but nobody I knew had one for socializing with people they knew, mostly just for following celebrities or news personalities. These days, Snap Chat, Instagram, and others have opened the field up more, so maybe if it had been released in that age people would have been more open to giving it a shot. Then again, it feels like privacy is much more in the zeitgeist, so maybe the idea of giving google access to even more of your life would be more laughable than it was previously.

Your characterization of things makes it sound like you only read headlines and never the memo. Which is fine I guess, but it seems silly to have such strong opinions about something without looking into it at all.

>One of them had searched for and shared confidential documents outside the scope of their job, while the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said.

I don't really like Google very much, but I'm with them on this one, these people sound nuts.

I certainly wouldn't call them perfect, but again, being able to criticize the leader (whether that be Trump now with the left-leaning media or Obama previously with the right-leaning media) puts them head and shoulders above what China has. Hell, 50 years ago journalist reporting led to the resignation of the president, can you see anything even remotely close to that happening in China?

>Furthermore, the whole point of anti-discrimination laws are to prevent judgement based off traits that cannot be changed. Where you live is not the same thing as your skin color.

This is very true. People are getting very caught up on discrimination without taking into account all of the "acceptable" forms that happen all the time. If you're a violent felon, you are likely going to be discriminated against when looking for a job in child-care. Yeah, this is an extreme example, but it's a form of job discrimination most people see as reasonable. Like-wise, people are discriminated against all the time in jobs for things like lack of qualification or lack of relevant degrees, etc., and again most see this kind of discrimination as reasonable. The kinds of discrimination that aren't reasonable are things like no hiring somebody because of their race because there isn't any reasonable connection between that fact and their ability to do job.

The question here isn't whether it is discrimination to not hire those who live in Russia or China, the question is if the underlying premise that those people are more of a data liability than other people. I haven't read the entire thread, but so far I haven't really seen much discussion on this point, just lots of people saying the policy is outright racist (even though I believe the policy only affects people who currently live in those countries regardless of race rather than not hiring people of Chinese/Russian descent who live elsewhere).

I think you're being a bit disingenuous. It seems you're almost implying Chinese and Russians are being randomly discriminated against for no reason, as if the kind of thing Gitlab is worried about has never happened before. Specifically with people loyal to those two countries. Yes, it is discrimination, whether it is baseless discrimination is much more debatable.

>I have no control over my government. Zero. 0. Do you understand the concept of 0? Thats the amount of influence I have over any government matter.

Then you should be more pissed off at your own government and screwed up system than the people who are pointing how that the system you live under is screwed up.

Because the USA has an independent media that is very critical of its government while China doesn't (at least not on the scale as the USA's main stream media). I mean maybe if you're a conspiracy theorist you could say it's just controlled opposition or a distraction, but in the context of this argument at least the US media is unafraid to criticize or even just straight up mock the government and it's leaders, that has to count for something compared to China.

>I'm curious who all these sarcastic bio "experts" are that are suggesting getting a PhD or hiring one

>Don't listen to anyone that tells you that you can't do something because you don't have a PhD.

I definitely don't think getting a PhD automatically makes you some super genius. I've also worked with a fair number of grad students get their PhD that probably shouldn't have just because they'd been in their program long enough and basically got "pushed" out. That said, if OP is coming at the perspective of starting a business and presumably needing to convince investors/clients that he knows what he's doing, it's kind of silly to suggest he doesn't need any PhD's working for him.

Even if whatever job they're doing doesn't really require "PhD-level expertise", hiring a PhD is a fairly easy way to lend yourself some credibility, particularly towards non-technical people who probably put more weight on having a higher degree.

Yeah I'm not sure I agree you need a full-blown PhD just to understand this stuff. Some-hands on work, definitely. I would say that you need a PhD to be taken seriously as a leader on the science-side of a biotech company though.

Your best bet is probably to look for a co-founder with an MS or PHD in molecular biology rather than trying to get yourself to that level from the ground up. If you have some biology background and just want to understand the specifics of Crispr, you can start with this paper[0] and just google every term you aren't familiar with until you make it all the way through. If you don't know biology at all, this[1] is a common text book in undergrad programs for molecular/cellular biology.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23287718

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/...

>This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.)

I'm not so sure about that. This site isn't that different from stuff like reddit or tumblr at it's heart, even if the level of discussion/quality of posts is higher. If you distilled these types of sites even further, it's really not all that different from social media like facebook or instagram. The only difference is the type of content shared and the fact that facebook and instagram are usually used with you being "yourself" rather than just a username. Then again, enough people on hackernews link their profiles to their own personal websites/linkedins/etc. that even that distinction isn't so sharp.

I feel like the only good reasons to use a VPN are if you're torrenting or if you want access to sites from different countries (foreign Netflix libraries, streams from state-run media channels, etc). Most VPNs worth a damn aren't going to sell you out just for torrenting movies/music/games while your ISP will.

Is that really true though? I would tend to think a transactional employee would be the first to think "I don't make enough to deal with this bullshit" in the face of drama/downturns in a start-up. If it's just a "time for money" trade, after all, then there's no reason to not just jump ship when the going gets tough.

My intention isn't to shame this attitude, by the way, I generally hold similar attitudes and start (casually) looking for new employment if things get too spicy at my place of work.

>And the thing about hiring is, as long as you don’t say the illegal thing out loud, and you use that coded language, you can do whatever you want.

This, seems like as long as you say a candidate "isn't a good culture fit", then it's fine to discriminate based on whatever criteria you want as long as you aren't stupid enough to say out loud or in an email "we don't need any more blacks/latinos/asians/whites/women/men/etc."

The only "raids" I can remember in recent history are things like online polls to choose the new Mountain Dew name or "who do you think won the debate last night polls", but then again maybe it just doesn't make headlines or have the unified goal like stuff from the 2000s did (chanology, etc).

I think it's totally fair to want to take a sampling of a lot of great authors to try out their work and then maybe follow up on more of their stuff if you find it compelling. True, they might not have the same level of appreciation for the book as if they'd been more familiar with all of their work, but if you try and tell people "you're not going to 'get it' without reading the 17 novels and 8 novellas he wrote before this", then if you're right you're going to just turn people off from trying.

Maybe this is the "plebian" opinion, but I see nothing wrong with wanting a taste of Dahl, Feynman, Homer, and Tolstoy rather than devoting your life to just one. He's reading for pleasure, not writing a dissertation.

I'm not a huge fan of capitalism, but it's a bit of a stretch to call this situation a failure of capitalism when the whole debacle exists because the Chinese government is making demands of Apple, which is not very capitalist. It doesn't really make sense to attack the ideology using an example where the ideology isn't really in practice, unless your point is that capitalism fails because it isn't flexible enough to work in a world where it does not reach 100% adoption. If so, fair enough, but I think that same criticism applies to every other economic system.

I'm not saying I like this current system either, I but I could definitely see some downsides to letting people legally sell bodies for profit. It certainly seems chilling to me that people could have serious conversation about "what to do with grandma" if you have to consider not only how much it costs to take care of her, but also how much you could stand to be paid for her. It opens up a lot of unpleasant doors, but I guess its up for debate whether anyone thinks that's worse that what we have.

Just skimming through the article you posted, it says trials with a similar treatment resulted in one patient dying from a massive immune response and two other got cancer. Sounds like it relies on a virus to deliver the DNA, but I didn't read too carefully, so maybe CRISPR will turn out to have fewer side effects or a greater success rate. I'm pretty sure one of the up-sides to CRISPR is compared to other gene-editing techniques it's relatively cheap, which is always a plus.

> Having watched a control group lose 70% of the people while the people getting the real drug survived is just inhuman.

Again, at this stage you're just assessing if the treatment even works. The point isn't to fix one group and screw over another, the whole point is that you don't know if the drug is going to do anything. It's much easier to tell if a treatment is worth giving to everyone if you first do the correctly controlled trials.

It seems like you're coming at this from a place of assuming the treatment is going to work from the get go, which is not true for the majority of treatments that undergo this kind of trial. Moreover, many treatments have side effects that, again, are much easier to look at if you can compared them to a group that went through the exact same handling. Even small, seemingly innocuous things like going to a hospital to talk to an interested person about how you're doing can have an effect on health readouts that may be relevant to a study. Or maybe the stress of sitting down having this weird hat put on your head affects something. Or maybe some much less obvious aspect of the study. The point of the control is that you cancel out all of these kinds of effects, obvious or otherwise, so that the ONLY difference is the treatment.

Controls also help with allowing double blinded studies. If the researchers know who is receiving treatment and who is receiving placebo, they can unconsciously influence the results, especially for things like behavioral surveys that aren't as objective as, say, taking blood and seeing if you have more or less cancer cells. Obviously you can't have this kind of blinding if the researchers know every single person is getting the real treatment.

Needed, I would say yes, definitely. Having controls is really a core tenet of science.

I wouldn't really think it's any more unethical than any other clinical trial for any other disease. The whole point is you don't know if the drug/treatment works, so I don't think it's unethical to withhold it. All participants are informed that there is a chance they'll receive placebo treatment as well, no one is being tricked. The point of the trial is to test the treatment, not to just fix a small group of people before the big roll-out.