Require diversity in the interview pool, not when making hiring decisions.

e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.

How long does the checklist need to be? Can I check three boxes if I an interview a gay black jew or do I only get one?

Three Booker prize winners I’m particularly fond of:

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite

I haven't read Evaristo but I will add Salman Rushdie to your list. Particularly, Midnight's Children.

I bounced off Midnight’s Children the first time I tried to read it, but that was probably 10 or 15 years ago now. I’m in between books at the moment, so your comment will push me to put it on the top of my list for the new year :)

Girl, Woman, Other is one of my overall favorites from the last few years. Th character work is phenomenal. Do try to read a hard copy, rather than on an ereader, if you can. The book uses punctuation and the layout of text on a page creatively, and I’m not sure how well that gets preserved in an ebook.

I've tried my damnedest, but simply cannot get into Rushdie. Given that Midnight's Children won the "Booker of Bookers", I thought that would be a great place to start. When I finished the book I turned it over in my hands wondering if I missed something or if I'm simply not smart enough to get Rushdie. I read a couple more of his books and the result was much the same, unfortunately.

Big Rushdie fan here. I used to think it could be because of a lack of cultural context especially for books like Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh but now I also think that it could also be a matter of taste. Rushdie himself quotes Milan Kundera who said: "...that the novel descended from two parents, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy". The latter is a style of writing where all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative so to speak. Rushdie's Midnights Children and James Joyce's Ulysses fall into this category.

If you want to see the other style of writing in Rushdie, I can suggest Shalimar The Clown or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But these are nowhere near as grand as Midnights Children.

In either category, a fair amount of interest in history helps to enjoy his books.

After a few pages into Midnight's Children it made me a bit uncomfortable (not bored)- not for the story or characters like in other novels- where you identify with characters or feel for them, their plights, etc. It made me uncomfortable in reading the way the story was told. I wondered why was this book so loved, it does not seem like any good book I've read so far, in fact it somewhat destroys the ideas I have about how a good novel should be. And then a thought occurred that maybe it is because of those things- as tirumaraiselvan (sibling comment) put it 'all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative'- that this book was loved. With that understanding I 'decided' I was going to be ok with the discomfort I felt till I finished the book. And then creativity became visible and the discomfort sort of went away.

Exactly! Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh are so non-linear that one cannot expect to get the hang of it till they are atleast 50 pages through. It's usually on the second reading that the amazingness of those initial pages is felt.

Krasznahorkai is by far my favorite Booker recipient

He also did the screenplays for most of Bela Tarr’s movies

It has been possible to print double-sided since at least Lion/2008…

Only if you have a printer that supports it. Otherwise you have to do it by hand https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-dou...

If the hardware itself doesn't support it, how would the software?

Windows approach: Print even pages first, ask the user to move the printed pages back to the printer and then print the odd pages later. The result is ready to be read.

In Mac you need to print first one side, move the pages manually, print the other side. But you have to remember to add an extra page if the page count is odd, have caution if an app tries to be intelligent and sort the pages in a different way...

In Windows all those calculations are done by the system. It is easy! Just print and follow instructions. In Mac is painful.

The issue is that the printer manufacturer needs to provide a printer driver for MacOS that gives MacOS access to that printer capability. (One could argue that Apple should write the driver, and they might for very popular devices.)

100% agree, and it's wonderful to see Snakemake on the top of HN.

Snakemake is an invaluable tool in bioinformatics analysis. It's a testament to Johannes' talent and dedication that, even with the relatively limited resources of an academic developer, Snakemake has remained broadly useful and popular.

Super nice guy too, he's always been remarkably responsive and helpful. I saw him present on Snakemake back when he was a postdoc, and it really changed my approach to pipeline development.

Yes, it's a DSL.

Here's a simple scatter-gather example. Let's say you want to count the number of lines in each file for a list of samples, and report a table of counts collected from each sample. Define a rule to process each input file, and a rule to collect the results.

I find this much less complex than an equivalent bash workflow. Additionally, these rules can be easily containerized, the workflow can be parallelized, and the workflow is robust to interruption and the addition of new samples. Snakemake manages checking for existing files and running rules as necessary to create missing files, logic that is much more finicky to implement by hand in bash.

    with open('data/samples.txt') as slist:
        SAMPLES = [l.strip() for l in slist.readlines()]
    
    rule all:
        input:
            "results/line_counts.txt"
    
    rule count_lines:
        input:
            "data/lines/{sample}.txt"
        output:
            "processed/count_lines/{sample}.txt"
        shell:
            """
            cat {input} |
              wc -l | 
              paste <(echo -e {wildcards.sample}) - > {output}
            """
    
    rule collect_counts:
        input:
            expand("processed/count_lines/{sample}.txt", sample=SAMPLES)
        output:
            "results/line_counts.txt"
        shell:
            """
            cat <(echo -e "sample\tn_lines") {input} > {output}
            """

This looks like... an unconstrained amalgamation of YAML, python, and zsh/bash. Knowing all these building blocks quite well, I cannot say I find this attractive at all. Seems like it is bound to incur all the problems that having everything in YAML cursed configuration management and deployment orchestration with in ansible.

> I’d have directed an institute to run a report on theoretic safety and then a trial on volunteers.

Commonly known as “pre-clinical development” and “clinical trials”

Except you can skip steps because volunteers have already tested the vaccine for safety and at the end of the story there’s a vaccine that you can make as much as you want of. Instead of a vaccine controlled by a single company that, surprise surprise, has production issues that according to them surely can’t be overcome by using production capacity at other facilities.

High-risk populations such as the immunocompromised are tested in a Phase 4 trial.

> Once automated/easy/rapid sample prep comes, there will be mass adoption in the space.

Sounds like Elon calling biology a “software problem”.

Not saying that you’re wrong, just saying that the computational folk tend to discount the challenges and skills required in the wet lab.

Agreed - Definitely a different class of problem than "software". There are large barriers, eg. lab contamination, biocontainment, low input protocols, etc; however, technological innovation will help with these.

That being said, we see a future where someone without advanced molecular training can put a sample (whether that's a nasal swab, concerning white powder received in the mail or lab-grown meat) in a black box and get out a meaningful report.

>> Not saying that you’re wrong, just saying that the computational folk tend to discount the challenges and skills required in the wet lab.

It's time to bring in the industrial automation folks. They probably won't invent a fancy new algorithm to reduce the time to splice the pieces together, but they'll fine tune and automate your reader to the 9's.

Question: a majority of software environments will take on individuals without traditional qualifications, throw a dozen books' exam sections at them, and keep those who can hack it.

I just realized industrial automation sounds really interesting. What would my chances be for someone who never got the chance to study math?

(Basically in 1998 it was illegal to change schools in Australia regardless of how much of an eyebrow-raising situation you might've been in. Had to homeschool, without any resources. Only realized ~20 years on just how much opportunity I'll never get back.)

(Heh, I'm pretty much expecting the only obvious possible answer at this point, I was just curious if the answer is "yeah no" or "it depends".)