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+18 +1
A non-profit is helping ex-convicts land job as Silicon Valley programmers
Seven months ago, Chris Schuhmacher was inmate number T31014, serving out the tail-end of a 17-year murder sentence at California's infamous San Quentin prison overlooking San Francisco Bay. Today, just months after his release, Schuhmacher blends in with the Silicon Valley crowd as a software engineering intern at a bustling tech firm, ditching his blue prison uniform for a sweater and khakis, and his cell for a cubicle.
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+15 +1
Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models Into This Year’s Holiday Parties
“Ambiance and atmosphere models” contractually obligated to pretend they’re party guests.
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+14 +1
Silicon Valley's Dumbest 'Inventions' of 2017
If 2016 was the year of “Uber for X,” 2017 was the year of Silicon Valley “inventing” things.
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+14 +1
Raw Water Isn’t Just Idiotic. It Exposes Silicon Valley’s Disinterest in Everyone Else.
The belief that “natural” is better has animated many food and health trends in recent memory, with natural as a shorthand denoting purity, a lack of processing, or rejection of modern medicine: raw foodism, enthusiasm for raw dairy, the paleo diet, and organic evangelism. Next up: “raw water.”
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+26 +1
H-1B: Immigrants make up nearly three-quarters of Silicon Valley tech workforce, report says
With the debate over immigration to the U.S. as fiery as ever, a new analysis suggests that Silicon Valley would be lost without foreign-born technology workers. About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born, compared to around 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region, according to a new report based on 2016 census data.
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+18 +1
Buses carrying tech workers targeted outside San Francisco
Six shuttle buses transporting Apple and Google employees were deliberately targeted by vandals who broke the windows with unknown objects while traveling on a highway south of San Francisco, authorities said Thursday. Four Apple charter buses and one Google bus were attacked Tuesday during the morning and evening commutes along a 16-mile stretch of Highway 280, which connects San Francisco to Silicon Valley, said California Highway Patrol Officer Art Montiel. He said no injuries were reported.
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+11 +1
Google employees say the company's not doing enough to protect them from harassment, threats
The firing of Google engineer James Damore for claiming women are not biologically suited for technical roles has triggered a culture war inside the Internet giant, with some Google employees saying the company is not doing enough to protect them from a harassment campaign that has subjected them to hateful comments and violent threats. These employees, many of whom volunteer as diversity advocates, say they've been targeted by some of their own coworkers for fighting to bring greater diversity to Google's 78,000-plus staff of mostly white and Asian men.
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+19 +1
Inside Silicon Valley's quest to beat ageing
To understand what's happening in the tech world today, you need to look back to the mid-1800s, when a Frenchman named Paul Bert made a discovery that was as gruesome as it was fascinating. In his experiment, rodents were quite literally stitched together in order to share bloodstreams. Soon after he found the older mice started showing signs of rejuvenation: better memory, improved agility, an ability to heal more quickly. In later years, researchers at institutions like Stanford would reinforce this work.
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+16 +1
Killing the 'Google can't innovate anymore' argument
Googlers leaving Google is not always news, but when an outspoken former Google advocate breaks free and starts flamebaiting, it’s worth considering their thoughts. Steve Yegge’s blog about leaving Google after 13 years in the colorful, happy, free-food-everywhere world caught plenty of attention. That’s definitely what Yegge was after too — he spent more than half of the post hyping where he’s off to next. It’s a fine playbook.
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+18 +1
Early Facebook and Google employees form coalition to fight what they built
A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build. The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States.
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+15 +1
Surveillance Valley
If the Internet is truly such a revolutionary break from the past, why are companies like Google in bed with cops and spies? By Yasha Levine.
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+23 +1
Google Legally Fired Diversity Memo Author, Labor Agency Says
Google did not break the law when it fired an engineer who wrote a memo critical of the company’s diversity efforts, a lawyer for a federal labor agency said. Last year, James Damore, a little-known engineer on Google’s search infrastructure team, incited outrage at the company and across Silicon Valley for making an argument that seemed to rationalize the pay and opportunity gap between genders at technology companies.
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+30 +1
James Damore’s labor complaint against Google was completely shut down
Google didn’t violate labor laws by firing engineer James Damore for a memo criticizing the company’s diversity program, according to a recently disclosed letter from the US National Labor Relations Board. The lightly redacted statement is written by Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel of the NLRB’s division of advice; it dates to January, but was released yesterday, according to Law.com. Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore’s memo were legally protected by workplace regulations, “the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.”
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+13 +1
Snapchat’s redesign was meant for your friends, and celebrities aren’t your friends, says CEO Evan Spiegel
Kylie Jenner isn’t happy with Snapchat’s redesign. That probably means it’s working. Jenner, a member of the insanely popular Kardashian family, tweeted to her 24.5 million followers on Wednesday afternoon that she was no longer opening Snapchat. Bloomberg says Jenner’s tweet, which was “Liked” more than 327,000 times, cost Snap $1.3 billion in market value.
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+20 +1
Facebook’s Stock Tumbles Again, Value Drops By More Than $50 Billion
Facebook’s stock is sliding for the second day in a row. Shares of Facebook fell another 5 percent Tuesday on the heels of the company’s worst day in four years. More than $50 billion has been wiped off Facebook’s market value this week. Investors punished Facebook after Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users to influence voters.
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+16 +1
People were asked to name women tech leaders. They said “Alexa” and “Siri”
The tech industry has a persistent problem with gender inequality, particularly in its leadership ranks, and a new study from LivePerson underscores just how depressingly persistent it truly is. When the company asked a representative sample of 1,000 American consumers whether they could name a famous woman leader in tech, 91.7% of respondents drew a complete blank, while only 8.3% said they could.
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+25 +1
Facebook is complicit, not a victim, in the abuse and misuse of personal data
I was always curious why Facebook, did not have a “dislike” button to complement its “like” button. Now we know. The Cambridge Analytica outrage is now a major scandal — both financially and morally — for the multi-billion-dollar business. Surprisingly, and disappointingly for some, the scandal is not about politics or elections. Instead it’s the massive internal breach of data; the attempted cover-up; the failure in duty of care by the tech giant and a cratering of trust. This despite Facebook spin and the ready co-operation of the anti-Trump sections of the media.
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+21 +1
The Silicon Valley quest to preserve Stephen Hawking’s voice
Eric Dorsey, a 62-year-old engineer in Palo Alto, was watching TV Tuesday night when he started getting texts that Stephen Hawking had died. He turned on the news and saw clips of the famed physicist speaking in his iconic android voice — the voice that Dorsey had spent so much time as a young man helping to create, and then, much later, to save from destruction.
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+8 +1
HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Turns Facebook Logo Into Russian
Blink and it was gone, but on Sunday night, HBO's Silicon Valley referenced the ongoing tumult at Facebook. The title sequence of the season-five opener showed familiar tech giant logos like Airbnb, Uber, Oracle, HP, Intel, Twitter and YouTube — and also a flickering Facebook logo that briefly appeared in Russian Cyrillic script lettering.
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+34 +1
“This Is a Slow Roll”: Silicon Valley Insiders Think That Facebook Will Never Be the Same After the Cambridge Analytica Scandal
The scandal, the latest in Facebook’s tortured history with privacy concerns, has eroded the potential for any of the company’s leaders to ever credibly run for public office. And it’s made Zuckerberg’s Chinese dreams a lot more fraught. One tech investor put it more succinctly: “They’re fucked.” By Nick Bilton. (Mar. 20, 2018)
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