Fascism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens.

Capitalism uses the power of the state to ensure its corporations can oppress its citizens.

Communism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens and ensure its economy remains in shambles.

Socialism grants significant power to the state with the expectation that it will use that power for good, and then its citizens are shocked and outraged when the government uses that power to oppress its citizens.

Wow... so this guy wants Google to know absolutely every private detail of your life so it can "connect the dots"? Financial transactions? Medical records? Google knows what food you and your friends like best so can recommend restaurants? Is this sort of hand-holding really something people want? Do you really need a computer algorithm to tell you to look up a friend in New York if you're traveling there? Can you not just ask your friend to find you a great local place to eat (hinting at a few of the types of places or foods you like)?

There's a lot that Google can do that would be really hard to do on your own. If you're in a strange city, the ability to ask "Where is the nearest Italian Restaurant?" is awesome, and it can guide you there in your rental car step by step (this was exactly what happened to me a month ago). Google doesn't need to know my food preferences. I can decide for myself that I'm in the mood for some deep dish pizza, thank you. And financial transactions or medical records? No, Google, you're not getting them from me, at least if I have anything to say about it.

I don't consider myself privacy nut. I use G-mail, and don't mind the targeted ads I see. I don't really care all that much about Google tracking my search results - fairly boring stuff to anyone but myself. I can always switch to DuckDuckGo if I need privacy there. But the extent to which some people are willing to give *everything* to Google sometimes surprises me.

I've been writing code like this since 1985. Then, it was in LISP.

It's actually trivial to me at this point. You end up with a meaning trie with differential probability vectors, and some of the roots wither away as you go down. Making a machine decision is harder, but not entirely impossible.

I get incredibly annoyed at people like Lazlo Bock who want to put everyone's resumes into a form that basically allows Google (Lazlo Bock works for Google) or other companies to magically allow you to come into a new job under the horse collar of a performance review of your previous job which they were in no way involved with.

The whole "HR metrics" industry... uh... kinda pisses me off? I pick companies based on criterion other than standard metrics. If they pick me that way... they do not deserve me. Mostly they stumble into me, I fix them, and then I exit.

I understand the "OMG we need people who know what they are doing and not recent graduates!" panic. Does not mean I sympathize.

No problemo

I miss subtle stuff all the time. I rely on really strict semantics in place of "not trusting people", which I have a hard time doing (data is data).

And then he opened the SPARCStation pizza box to reveal... a Zilog UART!

For my 22K of code...

Yes. 3 bugs.

Errors are less of a problem than revisionist history.

I spent 4 weeks thinking, and then I coded 22,000 lines of C++ in about two weeks.

Ended up in wrist braces.

The code was worth it.

Give me the fixed cell VT102 (yes, I need a printer) font any day.

Also it is much better for code.

Technically true, but that's not a helpful description to call everything "human error". We all understand there's human error involved, but the language used gives us more information. If the machine had a faulty circuit, we still call it a "problem with the robot" in order to affix blame not on the robot, but which humans involved - the ones who were working with the robot or the ones who built the robot. I'm pretty sure everyone understands humans built the robot, and are thus involved in the process and potential blame for when things go wrong.

Read the blog post again. http://insights.dice.com/2015/...

"I think that’s pretty cool, given we’re generating that automatically from job descriptions posted on our site. We also tried using the resume dataset, but the results were of a lower quality, as the skills extracted from resumes can be from different jobs."

It was extracted from job-postings, which would only identify Schelling points in the hiring industry, not skill clusters common to people with certain desirable skill sets; in other words, it "how to fudge your resume", rather than "how to find employees like the ones I have which I like".

It's not very reliable data.

They took the similarity vectors from the job postings, not from resumes, so rather than "what you're likely to know", they computed "what an employer is likely to want at the same time as wanting something else", and then declared that a similarity due to an already skewed cosine similarity metric. This happens because employers are more likely to copy other, similar job postings, or other job postings for companies in a similar business as them, or those of a company whose employees they wish to hire away.

They claimed that they tried using resumes, but that the resulting data was not as "clean"; uh... duh?

This visualization was not actually very useful, unless you are trying to design a resume to get yourself hired, regardless of your actual current capabilities.

Secret struggle...

Thanks a hell of a lot. Now it's no longer a secret!

(getting quite a bit off topic here)

I disagree. I think that we are quite capable of sending a probe to Proxima Centauri.

We just aren't able to send a probe that will send us any meaningful results in less than a few millenia. But I think we could - were we to put our minds to it - develop a probe that could ride out the centuries and send back a signal when it go thtere.

Heck, if were ready to spend a few times the world's yearly GDP (and not let certain political issues like worries like launching large nuclear devices into orbit), we probably could launch an interstellar probe that would get there in a single human lifetime.

It hasn't been entirely TECHNOLOGY that has been limiting us to this single basket of eggs that we call the Solar System for a long time.

If the images are anything to go by, then one of them is a Hasidic Jew from Israel, another is an actress in Chicago, and another is some guy in New York.

Unless they aren't, in which case their picture icons are being used in violation of Copyright, unless they have written permission from the image owners...