skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was playing recently with logical planning [1], and heuristics to determine what possible actions to explore. A heuristic that I happened upon, that worked quite well, was to work backward from the desired solution and choose actions that reduced the requirements on the state of the world.

The result was not plans that were optimal, but it found plans quite quickly. When I changed it to find optimal plans (essentially performing a reverse breadth-first search) then it did so, but instead of "finding" a solution it simply exhausted the space of actions and states. The algorithm stopped seeming intelligent, and merely felt thorough.

I wonder if this is state-requirement-reducing heuristic is closer to the problem-solving approach we use. Not an approach where we understand the world thoroughly, but one where we make plans that require the least specificity of the state of the world.

In part this is because our planning is iterative; given a goal: plan towards the goal, perform an action, observe the state, plan towards the goal, perform the next action. Unexpected effects are accounted for... eventually. And the result is often not optimal.

Also logical planning does not introduce conditionals, even though our plans always contain conditionals. To use the Yale Shooting Problem [2], we might construct a higher-order action, like "shoot the turkey" – and implicit in this action is "if the gun is not loaded, load the gun, then shoot the turkey". Also "if the turkey has escaped, find the turkey, then shoot the turkey". If the turkey escapes while you are loading the gun, then perhaps a better plan would have included securing the turkey before loading the gun, but this is exactly the sort of mistake that humans make in their planning.

With conditionals it's even easier to have actions that reduce the specificity of the requirements to achieve a goal. But the plans will probably not be optimal, but still they are resilient to a world with unintended consequences.

[1] https://github.com/ianb/bitplanning
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_shooting_problem
> over their colleague's right to a workplace where they're not judged by their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance.

Right, that's what he campaigned for. And not hire people due to their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance...
Highly educated people in the sciences can in fact be quite vulnerable to just this type of hubris, ie thinking that having expertise in one area means expertise in the whole field.

Nobel prize winning scientists have damaged their reputations by opining on matters they know little about (James Watson on genetics, and many others )

Some infamous examples:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18638_4-nobel-prize-winners-w...
Does anyone know first hand if any employees agreed with the sentiment in this memo? Shouldn't they be let go as well?
So... he writes an article stating that Google is intolerant of diverse points of view. He states a point of view that Google doesn't agree with, but which is not otherwise particularly extreme or unusual. Within days other employees are making violent threats against him and he is fired.

Well done, guys. It's hard to imagine any way you could have more effectively proved him correct.
Here you have four scientists with a "review" of the manifesto:

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

They seem not to agree with you.
You're using the relatively recent redefinition of the term "racism", that claims that racism is only systemic prejudice from a position of power (the so-called prejudice+power definition).

With this definition, yes, it is impossible to be racist to white males in US.

The problem is that this definition is not what the word actually means in colloquial English. So when most people talk about racism, they have that conventional definition in mind, not the stuff that social studies use these days.

And frankly, this attempt to rewrite the dictionary doesn't seem to have any reasonable justifications. We already had various terms and combinations of terms that describe the nuances fairly well - we had "racism" to mean "racial prejudice", and we had "systemic racism" to mean prejudice+power.

The only reason why I can see to change these around, to, effectively, replace "racism" with "racial prejudice", and "systemic racism" with just "racism", is because "racism" became a word with extremely heavy negative connotations. And some the same people who campaigned for it to become that - and rightly so, IMO - became uncomfortable with the fact that those negative connotations now also applied to some members of minority groups (e.g. the New Black Panthers). With the new definitions, this problem disappears - NBP is "prejudiced", but they're not "racist" anymore.

And this is very problematic, because the result of that is that bona fide hate speech - like, literal explicit calls for murdering people based on their race - is treated as more acceptable than e.g. pay disparity.
To be fair, there were references in the actual document (which were omitted from the Gizmodo reproduction)
This is good advice, though the article also mentions that self-paid drugs don't count toward deductibles. In addition to shopping around, patients should calculate their deductibles and estimate how that might impact their spending.

...which is a messed up, Byzantine system. I'd love a single payer system just to crush this inefficiency out of the system and make patient's lives easier. I would have thought healthcare is all about saving lives but in the U.S. it seems like a dirty busy.
I'm all for reducing systemic discrimination but is the way to do it discrimination in the other direction (which you construe diversity hiring as being)? If that answer to that question is no, then the only way to deal with the system discrimination is to work hard to undo biases in people who do hiring. That's a hard/unsolvable problem, due to the difficulty/impossibility of actually changing people's minds.

Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
None of what he said were men's rights dog whistles. If you think this you clearly don't have an ear for them. The closest you could say is he was maybe inspired by Peterson and Slatestarcodex.
I would be curious to know at which point in history one could circulate a memo around the office which embarrassed the company and insulted half the workforce without repercussion.
It’s pretty easy to find at least one scientist who will deny global warming, or that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. That doesn’t make that scientist right any more than these (all male, all white) scientists.

The assertions of the author of the screed are not well-accepted, and they are not facts. They are conjecture, and the author attempted to make universals out of primarily American ways of thinking and ingrained ways of discrimination.
Gilmar chama Janot do mais desqualificado a ocupar a PGR; procuradores criticam
At least one California lawyer thinks that this kind of firing over a call for a change in labor practices is illegal:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...

> First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions.

> Second... California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.

> Third, the engineer complained in parts of his memo about company policies that he believes violate employment discrimination laws... It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.
Do you think that saying "more men than women are interested in software development" is as evil as child labor, al Qaeda terrorism, restricting the vote, or legalizing rape?
The activity here correlates very well with the amount of actual citations and rebuttals of the original document.

It's almost like it's just a massive act of collective misrepresentation, one of those "winning the narrative" kind of situations.
Women in general used to have better cooking skills than men, but the majority of chefs were male and are still male.

Here's a UK survey of chefs: http://www.bighospitality.co.uk/People/Survey-finds-imbalanc...
Google fires engineer who “crossed the line” with diversity memo
How is my data being used here? Not super comfortable giving my address and then giving information about the house when there's no information about how the data is being handled/stored.
I'm pretty sure Google does not in fact "admit they do [anything] to increase female count".
In California political activities or affiliations are a protected class. Whether his document qualifies for that would be debatable I would imagine.

I don't see it getting to litigation though. I'd be shocked if Google didn't offer him a fairly hefty severance payment in return for a release of all legal claims.

EDIT: Maybe don't listen to any of my predictions m'kay.

https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/894747912701263873

(tweet author is a NYTimes Journalist who covers Google)
"the groupthink is terrible here! I can't say I want women to be thrown into a trash compactor without everyone getting mad!"
The "honeymoon phase" need not end. Many of the maturing adults I know find love getting deeper and life getting better every year.

Continue to make your partnership the highest priority in life and never assume that things have to be worse.
The "phenomenon that affects others" in my comment was that some qualified people get passed over for promotions. That's not the same as your "shouldn't face discrimination" so your response is a non sequitur. It is not possible to eliminate the phenomenon of qualified people being passed over for hiring/promotions, for all groups. The decision-making processes involved are just not that precise or perfect. The only way one group can be immune to that effect is in the presence of systemic bias that outweighs the vicissitudes of that imperfect decision making ... and that is indeed privilege. You're not going to prove otherwise by twisting other people's words.
Being religious and scientific are not mutually exclusive. I am not a religious person, but my professor, who is very religious, is one of the most rigorous scientists I had the chance to work with in person.
I am assuming you are talking about database indexes. The documentation for the database that I have most used actually specified what the various supported types were good for. It made choosing the correct type of index much easier. The documentation may be sufficient for determining which index types will perform well for the expected queries, even if knowing detailed information about data structures is nice to know. Having documentation which describes the data structures well enough is really nice though, and should be encouraged a lot.
His claim: across various traits, men and women have distributions that differ in mean but still largely overlap. This is a possible non-bias cause of the gender gap in tech. Specifically to ward off the concern you're about to raise, he adds a tedious note and graphic: http://diversitymemo.com/#possible-causes-gender-gap

You read all of this, and promptly summarize: "women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers."

What's happening here?
Well not half, only about what, 30%? /s
Maybe Google fired him for being an idiot as they value smarts? Unless you're trying to get into politics, you have to be pretty dumb to publish something like this under your own name, let alone distribute it at your job. Not a big surprise.
The most direct reading of his claim is that they're hiring unqualified women. He would presumably be happy with a larger mix of female colleagues if he felt standards weren't being lowered.
Try replacing "men and women" with "different skin color" and see if the idea that different groups could have different innate desires still makes sense.
Would you please stop the gratuitous provocation? Hacker News is for thoughtful discussion and this foils it in the most uninteresting way.
I agree, there are numerous issues out there worthy of overhaul:
* Circumcision
* World military dominance
* Eating meat

I could go on and on, but to answer your second question, it's not like people make a big list of issues then pick one. They have momentum and right now this one has it. It also has the advantage that people can, in a sense, take action about it.... to the extent you count being a keyboard warrior as taking action :)

It has momentum because, to a large extent, the people who brought the internet to the mainstream were these brilliant, powerful people, from the nerds to the politicians. Instead of it being received like a gift, most latecomers to the internet decided to use it to amplify their grievances.

Think of a teenager defying its parents "I didn't ask to be born." One might perceive these to be the immature, ungrateful voices of the cyber-rebels, YET they are also adults and full humans worthy of autonomy. They see the success of the people who create(d) the internet and they want a piece of it, too. They'll use it to get what they want.
> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias

You mean unqualified women not getting jobs due to a lack of bias, right?
Yes, software companies hire more white men than they should, given how many people are white men. The key question is whether companies are hiring more white men than they should, given the candidates available for hire. I don't think it's appropriate to use evidence about the first to make decisions about the second - a company's moral responsibility for playing fair largely stops at the boundaries of their org chart.
This isn't responsive to what I wrote.
This is why I'll never work for Google. Plain and simple.
Oh they do, a lot:

https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/focusing-on-diversi...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-firms-borrow-football-play...

https://www.google.com/diversity/

https://qz.com/604723/when-google-increased-paid-maternity-l...

http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/technology/google-diversity-...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952141 and marked it off-topic.
Some of this insanity is covered nicely in the econlog podcast[1] on the book Drug Wars[2]. The NY Times always wants to throw all of the blame at insurers, but they are trying to save money. The generic system is a Kafakaesque set of regulations and processes.

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/06/robin_feldman_o.htm...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Drug-Wars-Pharma-Raises-Generics-eboo...
I don't have any data on weight or body fat, but there's plenty of research into attractiveness of women with various waist-hip ratios and yes, it has dropped steadily from around 0.77 in 1500 to 0.68 in the last half-century. However, does even a WHR of 0.77 correspond to being fat?

Source: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Well he's now been fired.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
Or it's an implicit admission that the qualifications they look at are bused and they don't know how to fix that.

There's an underlying assumption in these discussions that implementing a meritocracy is easy and examining every candidate without regard to their race and sex is the default state of affairs. In this view, any changes you make to the process is necessarily de-optimizing for merit.

But what is "merit"? This isn't a field where you can quantify it. If you were hiring people to lift heavy objects or something, you could test them all and hire the ones with the best numbers and be confident you got the best people for the job. There's no way to implement something like that for the jobs Google has.

So we approximate. We look at degrees and open source projects and do in-person interviews. We pretend that this results in a purely objective evaluation of the candidate's ability to do the job, free of any bias... not because there's any reason to think that's true, but because we really want it to be.

Techies often bemoan whiteboard interviews for being unfair: the skill being tested isn't really the skill you'd use on the job, and it discriminates against people who get nervous when put on the spot, or whatever. It's not outrageous to think that maybe some parts of the interview process, without ever intending to, discriminate against women and minorities in a similar way.
Can you give some examples of the positive discrimination?
How would forking occur? Forking requires copying data. Does the universe get cloned infinitely many copies all the time? That's quite an extraordinary claim.
That isn't what happened here. There are some employment law considerations [1] but political action and affiliation isn't what happened here.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
What? Sure it is. You say he said "Women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers" when he didn't.
Can you please open source this under an MIT or some license you agree with?
(2004)

Prior Posts:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20you%20cant%20say&sort=b...

This one has 291 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420

Follow-up:
http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

Follow-up thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956884
> Or it could skip requesting the tree and verify the whole file at once.

To clarify, this works by the client deterministically reconstructing the tree once they have the whole file, then checking the root's hash, correct?
Listed "data" and "studies" doesn't suddenly make you right. Studies are far from perfect, especially in this field, and even more so when tons of other studies contradict these conclusions. You don't get to wave a magic want and say "I'm using FACTS so you're wrong!!"
If a metaclass is a way to make classes, can you have a meta-metaclass that makes metaclasses? Meta-meta-metaclasses to make meta-metaclasses? (etc)
They have been doing shutdowns of particular lines for planned maintenance, but almost always with replacement service in place (either other nearby subway lines, or for more isolated lines, buses). And then there are major tunnel repairs, which can lead to shutdowns of over a year. (There's an upcoming shutdown on the L which a lot of people are dreading, as there is no good replacement service of anything like the same capacity.)
I think you forgot Nazism.
Motherboard has a link to a version with all sources, that's the one I evaluated.

I can't comment on how Google arrived at the decision or what their line is. Personally, I think these things should be debatable.

But the author didn't do a lot to help himself dull the predictable outcry. He hedged with some comments about his intentions, but a lot of the claims are pretty anachronistic. Given how controversial some of the claims (especially the biologically essentialist ones) were bound to be, I think he could've used a different tone and some better faith representation of the other side.
Center-right / right individuals need to start organizing their own groups, companies, meet ups, jobs etc.

Vote with our feet, and our skills, and go elsewhere. They want to enforce their religion then they can do it without us.

There have to be plenty of people sick of watching what they say, walking on eggshells, and pretending to hold political views opposite of their true beliefs just to avoid the wrath of the regressive left.

This is only going to get worse, and I don't see why we all have to sit back and take it any more.
We'll just do the same thing. Call the three systems BMT, IND, and IRT.
Yes... things were different back then, weren't they?
I hear what you're saying, but why would you want a GOP sticker on your laptop? Neither party is exactly the champion of the common man.
Entropy isn't dead, but entropy estimation should be. It's the same thing as the transition from Yarrow to Fortuna in CSPRNGs: it's futile to estimate entropy.
Software historians differ on the degree to which the Windows NT 3.1 TCP/IP stack & utilities were derived from BSD, but it's one possible reason.
I know this is a sensitive topic, but Google's reaction is really just business. Women represent a huge and quickly growing sector of the economy. Public corporations would never take a big risk of their bottom line to support an individual's rights (ignoring whether those claims of rights are even valid or not). And, it's kind of silly to blame 'liberals' - because it transcends politics. Businesses are about making money.

(By the way, I think it is reasonable for some individual rights to be protected within the walls of a corporation, but as far as I understand it, many US citizen's rights, like free speech, do not cross over into private domains. I wish it was different.)
You might want to read Slavoj Zizek on ideology, since that's a deeper philosophical look at the same phenomena. Here's the quick video of him explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ

Basically, you might think about one thing as 'moral fashion' and another as 'social good', but you are really comparing two fashions and pretending to be objective.

To make a concrete example out of the situation in front of us: if there is proof that diverse companies perform better (https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter) then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.

So to say that he is 'correct' means to turn your back on empirical argument, and to base things in identity politics.
I'd suggest you consider not closing off far left participants from said endeavors. I'm as left as you come, and I'm still appalled by this behavior.

Censorship by any other name is still censorship, and they're not rights if you selectively protect them for "your" causes.
Radio navigation set to make global return as GPS backup
Relevant: Stossel's Racist Bake Sale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDVnzQD_FVU&t=88s
But they are well-accepted, and they have been for decades. If scientific consensus is any measure of truth, you should be defending his propositions with the same fervor you would global warming. Anything else is just science denialism.
So what we have is a debate or a discussion.. a disagreement.

Implying that should result in this guy getting fired is pretty ridiculous.
His religious beliefs are unscientific, and that is independent of how rigorous his practice of science is otherwise.
> an environment where one faces exclusion and persecution for simply having political beliefs that align with a large portion of their fellow U.S. citizens.

Can you elaborate on the persecution and exclusion you personally experienced from being an American conservative?
The fate of the guy who blocked the tanks is unknown, just BTW.
I don't know, in a perfect world there would be a debate where the learned would pitch in and enlightenment would ensue, that didn't happen.
>publishing a company-wide memo

But was it "published" as a "company memo"? Or was it spread virally through individuals?