Hacker News Reader

kyleschilleron Tinder and the Dating Apocalypse (2015)

One factor largely absent here (and actually obscured by their choice to interview investment bankers) is the huge amount of financial anxiety facing young people in America.[0]

Crippling student debt, a lack of savings and inability to find high-paying jobs can make the prospects of starting a family or even serious relationship hugely unattractive.

The assertion in this article that Tinder is great because you can hook up “without spending any money,” sounds callous coming from investment bankers, but for a ton of people, that's just the reality of the current dating landscape. If you're focused on paying back loans and working pretty much anywhere other than tech/finance/consulting, it really can feel hard to afford to date the conventional way.

[0]http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/28/pf/financial-anxiety/index.h...

kyleschilleron Tinder and the Dating Apocalypse (2015)

If the whole "apocalypse" thing seems alarmist, consider that Japan's birth/death ratio has been <1 for a while, and is now a matter of national concern.[0]

Of course, that's only a real problem if our immigration policies continue deteriorating.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Japan]

kyleschilleron Tinder and the Dating Apocalypse (2015)

Missing (2015) tag.

It's easy to read this as another shitty "millennial are ruining X" article that piles anecdotes on top of popular stereotypes, though it is maybe worth noting that marriage rates really are declining pretty quickly and consistently [0].

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...

kyleschilleron Google is coming after critics in academia and journalism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/?query=amazon&utm_...

Lots of press, most of it good, couple harsher criticisms:

Why this group is trying to stop Amazon from buying Whole Foods https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/17/why-t...

Amazon under probe for business in Iran https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazon-under...

Is Amazon getting too big? https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting-to...

But yeah, overall hard to tell if this is genuine or just there to make WaPo appear less biased.

kyleschilleron Make Self-Care Your Competitive Advantage

Yeah I'm with you on this, the moment we call self-care a "competitive advantage" it stops being self-care entirely and reverts to just being another "productivity hack"

kyleschilleron Show HN: Anonymous interview evals of strong software/ML engineering candidates

I'd recommend switching over to the singular "they" for referencing candidates, otherwise you lose a lot of benefits of anonymity.[0][1]

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-... [1]https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/blind-hiring-increases-wo...

kyleschilleron China may match or beat America in AI

Really curious what about an address tells you that a company is a front for the Chinese government. Do you mean it's an address in Beijing?

kyleschilleron China may match or beat America in AI

If you're going to comment about the "Chinese takeover" please take 2 minutes to at least read the first paragraph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril

'The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre) is a racist color-metaphor that is integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism: that the peoples of East Asia are a danger to the Western world. As a psycho-cultural perception of menace from the East, fear of the Yellow Peril was more racial than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is the white race's fear of the rising tide of colored people from the Orient.[1]'

It's entirely possible that you have a valid point to make, and maybe it's even an interesting and important one, but maybe also take a second to consider if it might be motivated by racist tropes.

kyleschilleron China may match or beat America in AI

"seems like a Chinese front if you look at the team."

...you mean it's Chinese people? What on earth makes this a "Chinese front" rather than just a company with a Chinese team?

kyleschilleron China may match or beat America in AI

The article is subtitled "Its deep pool of data may let it lead in artificial intelligence" for a reason, you can't just pull a "well trained" model out of thin air, and proprietary data is absolutely defensible.

kyleschilleron China may match or beat America in AI

'It's all just computer code'

Are you saying no software has trade secrets?

Sure, you can go through some tutorials and learn to build a CNN, or even read more recent research papers and hit bleeding-edge ImageNet benchmarks, but nothing currently public is going to get you close to Google's SDC.

You can't pretend this is just about people either, India's at 1.3B and they're far from becoming a world leader.

kyleschilleron Ask HN: What pressing world problems should a graphic designer work on?

We (Zenysis) are a recent YC startup using technology to help Ministries of Health prevent epidemics and distribute vaccines in developing countries. Happy to talk if you want to learn more!

EDIT: We're in public health, but compensate competitively, offer significant equity and provide top-notch benefits.

Job posting on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13727071

Designer role: http://www.zenysis.com/designer.html

kyleschilleron Why the average millionaire's college GPA is 2.9 [video]

In the original student, Karen Arnold went to great lengths to highlight this counter-intuitive phenomenon as a gendered issue [0] in which women, who tended to get better grades then men [0], would still end up less successful. It's seriously regrettable that her point got lost in this rehashing.

On a side note, I don't have the data, but would expect a similar effect with Asian-Americans, who tend to excel academically, but through socialization and institutional barriers, may fail to hit the "highest levels of success metrics" mentioned in this video. [1]

[0] https://archives.library.illinois.edu/erec/University%20Arch... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2016/01/20/how-asian-...

kyleschilleron Why the average millionaire's college GPA is 2.9 [video]

"Valedictorians often go on to be the people who support the system they become a part of the system, they don't change or overthrow the system."

I really don't buy this explanation at all. Valedictorians might tend towards conformity, but you don't need to be a revolutionary to hit 1M. Anyone with a 20 year career in finance, consulting or tech and reasonable savings can hit a million dollars without doing anything crazy.

kyleschilleron Why the average millionaire's college GPA is 2.9 [video]

It's worth noting that millionaires who inherited their wealth had much less of an incentive to care about their GPA since wealth was more or less guaranteed.

Also, children of millionaires will be able to attend top colleges even with substandard high school GPA/SATs [0], meaning they'll tend to underperform once there.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1047409881995483800

kyleschilleron New Rules Against Animal Cruelty Raise the Stake for India's Beef Wars

I don't know, that's kind of like saying we shouldn't be bothered by slavery if the slaves in question were "bred" for that purpose and wouldn't have existed otherwise. Of course, the fact that line of reasoning is analogous to a line of reasoning with an intuitively repugnant conclusion doesn't necessary help us understand the original line, where our intuitions are generated, or if they're appropriate in the original example.

You might be interested in Parfit's Nonidentity Problem [0].

"The nonidentity problem focuses on the obligations we think we have in respect of people who, by our own acts, are caused both to exist and to have existences that are, though worth having, unavoidably flawed – existences, that is, that are flawed if those people are ever to have them at all. "

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/

kyleschilleron Beyond Bitcoin: Truly Decentralized Banking

Yeah, 1 is exactly right, but hopefully Ethereum will be able to move to Proof of Stake [0].

[0 ]https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

kyleschilleron The Rise of the Thought Leader

An example from the article, Sheryl Sandberg, has hardly become a thought leader by trying to become one, there's nothing about the achievement that requires an intentional pursuit.

kyleschilleron The Rise of the Thought Leader

In my experience, Influencers at least have some kind of mass social media following they can use for marketing, Thought Leaders tend to lack even that.

kyleschilleron A new hypothesis in medicine: give patients drugs they know don’t work

The huge problem with this is that patients might choose it over medicine that does work. See Steve Jobs.

kyleschilleron The Repugnant Conclusion

Yeah, that's exactly what Parfit is trying to deal with.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/

kyleschilleron Dissecting Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo Compensation

I don't know, it mentions that she had "little control" over the investments, but then goes on to explain that:

   managing those investments was a key reason that Yahoo’s board hired Ms. Mayer. Mr. Loeb had accused Yahoo’s previous leaders of mishandling both their core business and the Alibaba relationship.... Ms. Mayer delegated the Alibaba issue, hiring an experienced dealmaker, Jacqueline Reses, to be the company’s principal liaison to Alibaba and its leaders, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai. Ms. Reses helped the Chinese company navigate its initial public offering. She also renegotiated an agreement, struck just before Ms. Mayer arrived, that would have forced Yahoo to sell an additional 122 million shares in the offering. Those extra shares are now worth $15 billion.

kyleschilleron Dissecting Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo Compensation

There are a lot of good points here, but it feels like most of her compensation is explained right here

  To lure Ms. Mayer from Google and compensate her for options she forfeited there, Yahoo’s board offered her a lucrative employment agreement. She initially received restricted stock worth $35 million and stock options worth $21 million, based on 2012 stock prices for Yahoo, along with a cash salary and bonus.

It sounds like Mayer was initially making way more than the 900k/week figure quoted in the title, so it almost doesn't make sense to talk about her performance the rest of the time if we're interested in explaining here salary. There were a couple of significant missteps that the article explains resulted in meaningful pay cuts, but it sounds like the bulk of her compensation was determined from the beginning.

kyleschilleron Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

Why can't AI tell you you're missing data?

kyleschilleron An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

Yeah, isn't this exactly what Sternberg is saying? It sounds like he's done a lot of work precisely on improving the assessments.

kyleschilleron An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

Yeah, I don't think Sternberg is advocating for ending standardized testing:

"My colleagues and I developed assessments for creativity, common sense and wisdom... we doubled prediction [accuracy] for academic performance, and with Kaleidoscope we could predict the quality of extracurricular performance, which the SAT doesn’t do."

It sounds like he just wants to reform them, and has some strong initial results to suggest that we could do much better.

kyleschilleron An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

Yeah, people with law degrees are probably overrepresented in politics, but pre-med?

kyleschilleron China has become a major player in AI

Facebook's M has had limited success, but on the other hand, News Feed, the core of Facebook's business, is build entirely around AI. And Google, of course, has had plenty of success with AI outside of Allo.

I wouldn't say "nobody cares or wants" AI, just that companies are still trying to figure out where it's best used.

kyleschilleron Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy?

Derek Parfit's Persons and Reasons deals with this question a little more formally, resolving the tension with the concept of "rational irrationality"[0, p12]

I think what Nielsen is getting at here is the idea that a commitment to accuracy doesn't necessarily entail an unwillingness to be wrong. As in Weber's case, the wrongness of one's work doesn't necessarily imply it's unimportance.

[0] http://www.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit-...

kyleschilleron Lyft adds a new app for drivers

With Homejoy, you could build a relationship with a single housekeeper, and arrange for them to come once a month. If you're using Uber to commute, it's absolutely the same and very worth cutting out the middle man.

The rest of the time, if you need a ride at a time/place that isn't regular, the driver you know might be far away, might not be driving at that time and might be driving someone else, so it will generally be worth it to pay a premium.