skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The homepage, but just now I refreshed and it started working. Odd. (I’m pretty sure I tried refreshing before, and it didn’t work then.)
You absolutely have a right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion at your place of employment if you work for a company with any sense. Companies that play fast and loose with HR risk becoming the next Uber - a company whose toxic environment has caused more than a few talented engineers to say they wouldn't work there for literally a million dollars.
The Little Schemer is really probably the best way to teach recursion.
Barebones text editor in 150 lines of Clojure
Do you really need internal statistics to prove that diversity programs increase the number of employees from the relevant demographics?

Come on. It's self evident that it's working.

Whether that results in effective outcomes for the business is a different matter; but if your KPI is just 'ratio of XXX in employees' there's no question its doing what it's literally designed to do.
Even without credentials, has anyone at all shown any part of the manifesto to be false yet?
Historically in America, the right was the home of authoritarianism - I fear greatly I'm whitnessing the birth of an authoritarian left. The thing that concerns me is the authoritarian left groups have been historically better able to organize than right wing ones.
That maybe the theory, but it often isn't how it works in practice. Unfortunately people who claims this publicly get fired. I don't know the numbers, but it would be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of a google job interview depends on gender or race.
He wrote about the motivations here: https://nakkaya.com/2016/06/10/ferret-a-hard-real-time-cloju...
Trusting such content and repeating their claims is attacking what they want you to.
My first software job out of college was working for a healthcare company. I worked in the Drug Comparison team (which consisted of 3 people) finding people ways to save on prescriptions by beating the system using software! Yay, helping the world and stuff.

Actually, we ended up selling out and building systems that benefited healthcare provider's formulary plans. For example, not recommending generics, which was most of what we got paid 500k+ per contract to do.

We did do some amazing work on Medicare Part D stuff, tho. We saved some elderly people tons of money by algorithmically reccomending them the right drugs at cheaper cost.
I commend your perfectly cromulent white paper.
There is a very long list of odious things you can claim "science" justifies; in fact, it's kind of hard to think of something you can't six-degrees-of-science your way to defending. This isn't the rhetorical kill-shot you think it is.
I don't dispute that it is measurable or reproducible, just that it is meaningful. The problem with self-report is that you can only ever measure perception.

Let's say I want to measure ability in chess. I give everyone a self report survey: how good are you at chess, 1 to 10? Group A averages a 6, Group B averages a 5. Reproduced across time and regions. Is group a better at chess? We have no idea. All we know is that they report a high average than group b.

Switch to big five: "I feel comfortable around people." Rate the accuracy. Even if group a rates more accurate than group b, what do we really known from this? Comfortable is a relative term. Do group a and b have different perceptions or different experiences?
If I say something like "our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back".

The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.

I'm inherently saying some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired.

Edit: just to be clear, my point is that Google has, to my knowledge, expressed this sentiment and made changes to their interview process to rely less on brainteasers. They did so without controversy. No one said "hey Google is saying some of its employees shouldn't have been hired by changing their hiring process".
I do not read his words as "google is illegally discriminating". He has listed several discriminatory practices. And I see and use the word "discriminatory" in a non-pejorative/non-judgemental sense.

The programs are "set asides" for specific groups of people unrelated to "merit". Is that not a fair way to describe that?

That's _not_ to say that those who go are meritless, but that the programs differentiate on factors unrelated to merit for the purposes of admission to said program. Is that a factually incorrect description of those programs? Do they not differentiate "applicants" on characteristics unrelated to merit?
Can I re-characterise your discomfort as being because the GOP has been subverted by people with fairly extreme racist/sexist views? I really doubt it has anything to do with liberals creating environments.

From my admittedly distant viewpoint (I'm not from your country), the GOP has changed substantially in recent years. It used to be a responsible political party that respected democracy. Then it seemed to start believing the ends justify the means - redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc. And at the same time accepting support from seriously racist and misogynist groups.

For example, the Obama birth certificate thing was simply a racist joke when it started. The GOP rank and file should have refused any association with those who suggested it, but because it served their purposes they embraced both the meme and the people promulgating it. The result of that (and more - Clinton trafficking children in a pizza parlour? I'm surprised they didn't add aliens just for good measure...) is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.

I sympathise that your political system provides just two big boats, so you are forced to row with people you aren't comfortable with. In New Zealand we have proportional representation which lets the more... colourful... people have their own boats, which is very healthy because they quickly realise how few people want to join them, and that their views are unpopular.
No, you did not read the article. You claim all scientists in the article were male scientists, while in fact one is female.
Gizmodo said they were removed. Not that Gizmodo removed them.
Again, affirmative action towards historically marginalized group is legal and is not a violation of protected status laws. It strains credibility to imagine the author is talking about discrimination against historically marginalized groups given the rest of their manifesto.
I have my doubts that they'd be regulated or actually come "under fire" for firing someone who caused an uproar about gender equality in the workplace.

Unless you are being discriminated against, or someone else is... I don't really think its' a normal employees place to be a political firebrand and post invective messages on the internal company boards.

Honestly if you say something that pisses off 60% of your coworkers to the point that they say they will quit... then you're not a good fit for the company.
IPFS DNS Support
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

I think I first heard it while studying sociology in 2006; signals were also a common topic in my econ degree.
I don't think he made that argument either.
Not only that, but he spends a considerable amount of time humble-bragging. I found that article unbearable.
> sounds almost exactly like the Frankfurt School/“cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory

Nope, it does not. The only common things are that both talk about Marxists (as do many other conversations, including ours) and about gender politics (as do many other conversations, including guess what). Not everybody who opposes Marxists is a Nazi who thinks Jews from Frankfurt School want to take over the world. And not everybody who thinks class-warfare (or identity-warfare) approach to society is wrong is a conspirologist Nazi.

> Its a specific conspiracy theory btw

Right. And that's why using it as a generic club to bash over the head everybody who ever mentions Marxists and their participation in gender politics in negative light is wrong.

> Maybe it’s not deliberate but given the context it raised a major eyebrow for me.

Only because your major eyebrow was on hair trigger to be raised. You need to adjust your eyebrow so it won't raise over every mention of mundane political arguments and not call a Nazi everybody who says something about Marxists. Having such eyebrow makes you look bad.
Dumping a lot more money is what my company does. Normally, we do one phone interview and one onsite session which consists of multiple interviews. We perform multiple phone interviews if a diverse candidate fails the first (or, occasionally, the second).

The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).

For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.
No. Freedom of speech is a social convention, and only secondarily a matter of law. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/29/against-signal-boosting...
There are bigots and misogynists in the Republican Party, and there are bigots and misogynists in the Democratic Party. Politics is much more than that, as are one's political views. No one deserves to be treated vitriolically for supporting a political party.
He cited studies, but not until very recently did anyone have the version which actually contained the references. Gizmodo deliberately removed all charts and links, and for a while they had the only copy. It was a profoundly dishonest thing to do on their part. I'd be surprised if 5% of people commenting online even realize he cited sources.
would 2 different torrents that contain a file with the same exact physical hash share the same torrent file hash?

if torrent A and B both contain the exact same file, but torrent A only has the first half available, and torrent B has the second half available, could I combine both torrents to download that file? this could help fix old dead torrents or at least make the file searchable elsewhere by it's sha256 for example
You should read the author's next post where he pokes a bit of fun at his metric:

http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/valuation-and-...
I haven't found any Intel hardware with the SHA extensions actually implemented. I was expecting it in Skylake but apparently that's not the case... Not sure when we can expect to see them.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953192 and marked it off-topic.
Yeah, it's a deterministic tree of hashes.

Each leaf is the hash of a 16KB chunk. On the next layer up you have a series of nodes which are the hashes of the two leafs below it hashed together.

You add enough layers until you get a single root hash at the root of the tree.
It was more rigorously argued than simply stating that 'was neither rigorously argued'. I've seen this sentence now a 100th time in this topic, and I haven't seen any of kind of proof for opposing any of his statements.
They don't say that the school matters, they say you have to actually refute him instead of saying 'he's just stupid'.
I guess I won't be working for Google anytime soon.
more than a few KB: can be a few MB.
It's especially significant if you have a torrent full of text files, and want a subset.
I agree that the author's arguments have been misrepresented, but as much by the author as anyone else. What we have is someone who is trying to couch borderline crazy views as reasonable and thoughtful and is smart enough to keep the lid on his underlying opinions with some success. But, read the author's footnotes for a real tl;dr -- he baldly states without evidence (indeed contrary to all the literature) that women are paid equally for equal work, that political correctness is a tool of leftists and authoritarians, and on and on.

His constant protestations that he's really interested in promoting diversity BUT is just the new "some of my best friends are X, but".
This essay, from a former Google employee, touches on the themes that go to the heart of why supporters of this guy are flat-out wrong in their take on the situation. Tolerance is not a moral precept: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
I'm not disagreeing with you, but we aren't talking about immigration policy here, we are talking about whether or not Patreon's content policy was violated.
> gender differences don't have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform any job--even physically strenuous jobs, with the right training

That seems just plain wrong considering so many women fail Marine fitness tests:

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/284252-report-6-out-of-7-f...

And FDNY had to relax physical fitness requirements in order to hire more women firefighters:

https://www.bustle.com/articles/53536-fdny-wants-more-women-...

Women also have to be separated from men in professional sports, otherwise in many sports it wouldn't even be close (e.g. the aged, #203-ranked male tennis player walloping both Williams sisters in their prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch).

There's nothing wrong with admitting there are basic biological differences between men and women relating to strength.
Ask HN: Conditions for dialogue about diversity issues?
Hey hackers,

Today I was very distressed about something about the James Damore thing. I felt that one "side" was so upsetting that I'm not so sure I want to work in the Silicon Valley tech industry anymore.

But I'm not going to tell you whether the "bad guys" for me were the people in my industry who agree with Damore, or the people in my industry who thought he was terrible and had to go. In some of the Hackers News threads, I thought I saw several people on the opposite side saying they're not sure they want to work in the tech industry anymore either! So it sure seems like there's a lot of distress to go around.

I was interested to ask here whether people would be interested in trying to find conditions for dialogue with their fellow hackers from the opposite side of the divide, either online or in person, with agreed-on ground rules from experts in dialogue across controversies, or following ground rules from other communities that've tried to do things like this before. For safety and also confidentiality so that people don't fear they're going to be targeted by anyone for sharing what they have to say.

Hacker News threads aren't that great for this because they're such a free-for-all, the conversation can take a flamey turn, and the upvote and downvote dynamic isn't the best. And anyway people may not want to get into this in public because it feels like a risk.

I have friends who say that "those people" aren't worth talking to, period. So if you think that, you maybe don't need to bother posting that opinion in this thread. It can always be a tempting point of view. Also you don't know whether I'm one of "those people" or not because you don't know what my position is. For present purposes, how about you assume that my beliefs on diversity in tech issues are opposite of your own?

So, just wondering, how much interest would there be in something like this?
A critique: https://medium.com/@patkerr/why-i-think-xkcd-is-wrong-about-...
> but a month or two from now, nobody will remember his name. He still has a possible future career.

Oh you must be joking. He'll never, ever work in the valley again.

If he spends the next couple months on a non-stop apology tour and participate in however many struggle sessions the various women's groups deem necessary, perhaps one day he'll be left alone and Twitter campaigns won't be started up every time he finds stable employment.

Maybe.
Nah, the employee blackened the eye of the company he works for, potentially causing monetary loss. As a result of the employees controversial memo, the company deemed it necessary to terminate the employee to prevent any additional costs incurred with keeping him on. He's free to spew whatever nonsense he wanto, just like his employer is free to prevent themselves from losing money. :)
What did he want to happen?

What did he think would happen?

Bonus: Why didn't he just post this to Reddit?
And... no one is surprised.

You can be "right" all you want, but then there is politics. It's been going on since at least the days of Socrates.

Every big org does plenty of silly stuff from perspective of rank and file. Sometimes it truly is silly, sometimes there are reasons that aren't obvious at that level.

I suppose Google made the rational decision. We'll have to see if it produces a martyr which is often the longer term outcome of these kind of situations. Doesn't seem like being a rallying point in the cultural war is a situation Google would want to be in at the moment, but who knows.

Thinking it may have been wiser to state publicly that every one is entitled to their opinion, but the official policy of the company was XYZ not open for debate. And then quietly send legal with a bag of cash and a stack of "zip your lip" forms and after the hoopla dies down a bit, an uneventful departure to "pursue other opportunities".
Did the employee support "stratifying opportunities based on sex"?
When the dinosaurs are around the small mammals can't break out of their niche and evolve into the forms we see today. The dinosaurs have too much of a head start on them. They were stuck for millions of years as mice and rats, and it wasn't until there was a sudden vacuum in the ecosystem that they were able to evolve into larger animals.

The mammals were more adaptable, but in a stable environment that isn't a big advantage. They can't compete against the highly specialized dinosaurs.

Interestingly enough, you see this effect with genetic algorithms today. They're very prone to getting hung up on local maxima and never finding the best solution.
Do you believe you would get the privilege of choosing what the media reports your argument as?
The 3rd point in that post was enlightening. Appreciate you linking us to the post.
> I think you mean

Oh well, s/dot product/"dot sum"/ :) :) :)

> how your recursive version does it

See, everyone? Recursion irons out bugs!
The author is either a total idiot or he just retired with a cool 10-30MM he would be paid by Google to be fired.

I'm going to guess it is the later: Lawsuit from him would cause discovery. Unlike other government lawsuit, he would actually be able to say who at Google has access to the needed paperwork/email/etc to demonstrate that he is correct in his assertion. The government would love to piggy back on him. So I'm guessing Google is cutting a very large check now.
and this is why they had to fire him. he can make 9 good points but 1 bad one and the only outcome is termination. i think google did the right thing. if this memo was 1/3 as long and only talked about censorship and diversity strategy, and left out the gender pseudoscience, he would probably still have his job. it was totally unnecessary to try and rationalize with uncited generalizations
how is the distinction relevant for an engineering candidate? unless you're implying that google has a pilot child labor project in the works it strikes me as highly superfluous
I've spoken to and overheard recruiters for Google who have quotas for women as well as minorities. In other words, the corp pressures them to hire non male, non-Asian, non-white, and to seek across the country for alternative hires.

I'm actually okay with Google seeking women across the country (when they could find a local candidate), but we should not pretend that they don't have internal targets their recruiters need to meet.
I don't think it wise to mix two controversial topics, especially since on their face they seem kind of contradictory. Gender identity discussions and biological dimorphism are both hugely emotional topics, and mixing them here would lead us down a discussion path we don't want to go.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
I think you should get used to the idea that reasonable people disagree strongly with the notion that they should be open-minded about any idea. There are plenty of things I am not open-minded about:

* The suitability of African people for chattel slavery

* The historical reality of the Holocaust

* The criminality of child sexual exploitation

Obviously, having spent more than 15 minutes on the Internet, I'm aware that there is some doofus connected to a keyboard somewhere who is prepared to open a lively and spirited dialog about all three of those issues. But, like a lot of other reasonable people, I'm not open to that dialog, and attempting to engage me in it will have consequences: I will never work with or in any way associate with a Holocaust denier or a child pornography advocate.

This can bother you as much as you choose to let it bother you, but the degree to which it bothers you won't have much impact on my thinking.

People love linking to Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay in this context. I've never had a conversation of any sort with Paul Graham that led me to believe that he was a crazy Cheetoh-stained Holocaust denier, or an advocate for the rights of the Cheetoh-stained or Holocaust-history-averse. I think "What You Can't Say" is by far his worst essay. And I'm hopeful that tire-fire threads like these do a better job of illustrating why than anything I could write to explain my point further.
> Nobel prize winning scientists have damaged their reputations by opining on matters they know little about (James Watson on genetics, and many others )

You mean to say that James Watson, the Nobel prize winning geneticist knows little about genetics?
Also, the larger problem with debunking is that it just doesn't work all that well. It's like arguing with an antivaxxer -- they may ask for logical discussion but it has no effect. Ultimately, what convinces them is social pressure or a sudden intrusion of reality i.e. their child gets sick, they have a female friend who encounters discrimination etc.
In many companies any form of out of line crosstalk can get you fired regardless of it's truth.
Interesting reading. Here's a relevant snippet from that page:

"I was extremely egalitarian prior to my transition I staunchly didn't want to think there were any neurological differences between men and women, it became obvious over time to me begin on estrogen there were. It's just tricky to discern the difference. It was distressing to realize that it makes a big difference and my brain and mind were just playthings of my body."

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4g1pgu/serious_t...
I wouldn't be surprised if this was due to issues with some generics not being the equivalent. Concerta is a weird drug with the one generic actually being rebranded brand name. The other generics are not considered equivalent by the FDA but the last time I checked some pharmacy such as Walgreens carry the non equivalents. Apparently they are tied up in a court case.

https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm422568.htm
They are not mainstream, they are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism