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.
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.