skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your two examples list physical differences, not mental ones. Forgetting the fact that your examples are both wrong (you don't have to be tall to [play basketball][1], nor do you have to be biologically female to model bikinis), mental differences are markedly different from physical ones, because unlike a requirement such as "you must be capable of lifting 200lbs" which _may_ skew male, almost all humans are innately & biologically capable of the critical thought required to program. The differences we see today comes from nurture, not nature.

There are no biological "skills" that men might possess innately that should make them a first-choice by default, nor is there any reason to ever pick a candidate over another because of some biological "fact". At the end of the day, you judge a candidate by their output (performance, displayed intellect), not their input (nature OR nurture).

This is the whole point of Google's unconscious bias training: humans create incorrect correlations between input (nature|nutrue) and output (perf, intellect) in the form of biases-- i.e., "if you're too emotional you can't think as rationally as someone who is less emotional, therefore you cannot perform at the same level as a less emotional thinker". The problem here is that the correlation doesn't hold; it's a bias, not a fact.

Here's the point: your "biological facts" are biases, evidenced by the fact that you think you need to be tall to play basketball or biologically female to be a bikini model, and neither of these things are actually true.

[1]: http://www.complex.com/sports/2013/05/the-15-greatest-short-...
can you cite the source? Because this sounds very unbelievable to me.
I work in a mid-size company structured in many ways similarly to Google and I cannot imagine a representative survey with results already coming up.

Google has close to 70k employees. What was the sample? How selected? How representative?

It sounds very questionable,
Carbon Footprint Reduction Guide by Henrik Kniberg of Spotify Fame
Firing a whistleblower is highly illegal (several allegations in the document of illegal discrimination).

Google is going to attempt to pay him a lot of hush money in hopes of avoiding a public lawsuit.
Of course he did. It's like Ukip claiming not to be racist. The most generous view is that they don't realise that what they advocate is discriminatory or disproportionately affecting particular demographics.
Show HN: Dedup – a deduplication tool (+lib) (golang)
Absolutely. To me, it's very similar to programming languages. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if people use Google's Go, C++, or some other language. What matters is what's produced by it: the actual research and results.

When you see a useful program that helps you be much more productive, you don't really care if it was coded in c++ or python.

The one part Google does care about is being able to sell Cloud TPU, but I don't think that by using this tool you're instantly in under their control.
In this context, the fact that the manifesto also violates the code of conduct makes it more likely that they feel obligated to act. If it were in a private chat or on his personal blog it would be much less of a big deal. Similarly, people posted stuff like that in g+ and memegen comments frequently without getting fired. I think the scale and visibility is part of why he got a bigger response in general. Sending around a less controversial manifesto inside the company probably would've been fine - I think he could have easily just focused on the diversity programs and elaborated why he thinks they aren't working well, and that wouldn't have gotten him fired or caused such a controversy.

For whatever reason, he decided to go in deep and lay out his entire worldview on biology and gender traits, ensuring as much disagreement and conflict as possible. Whether this means he intended to cause problems or he just didn't understand how to complain constructively is a big question...
A general purpose counting filter: making every bit count
what are you talking about? there's no tax in the paris accord.

Do you mean the fund to help countries affected by climate change? that countries can voluntarily donate money to. They can put anything they want into it, even $0. Those pledges aren't even enforced. A country can pledge whatever, and change their mind later.

You've literally made up several things: a tax; hundreds of billions of dollars; an unaccountable global entity... none of it in the paris accord. I assume that's why you're being accused of being anti-science (if that was really a mystery to you).
If you thin Breitbart and Hannity are fringe, I've got news for you...
Just in case you've missed it: https://hy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
> If someone wants to be a cop, and can't get hired, they probably shouldn't be a cop.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...

(This is a very old article, and I have no idea if that's still a thing, but that sentence made me think of it)
That's actually great for other companies. So many hiring opportunities.
It is not that easy to grow your plugin to 100k users in one year
Hah, I didn't know precisely because in my case I've always seen an IPv4 address on mobile...
Diversity programs are doing a lot more than "recognizing". Recognition is just perception and perhaps symbolic communication. Diversity programs are action.

In this case, the action is to shift economic opportunity from one group to another based on visually-identifiable group characteristics. This is justified by the the idea you stated, which is that the group being disfavored is collectively guilty.

Of course, we ignore how many people in that targeted group have no present or past connection to the sins that are being "recognized" by denying them a way forward in life. I'm sure a white male Ukrainian refugee passed over at Google for "diversity" would not be impressed.

If you're in favor of a policy, you should be able to clearly state what that policy actually is, not hide it behind a linguistic smokescreen which minimizes and obscures what's really happening. Own it - the goals, the methods, the unintended consequences, and the victims. Every social policy has them, so own them.
You could argue that but that in itself doesn't give the argument credibility.
I bought an Xbox One S recently (didn't know anything about the S it was just a good price for an Xbox).

Its a beautiful piece of hardware and doesn't look out of place under the TV like the old Xboxes somehow did.
It's important to read this document before commenting.
The censored version from Gizmodo etc. had all important references removed.
Most people don't consider the mere statistical description of aggregate group behavior "misogynous". Nor should they. You use powerful emotional rhetoric when you embrace this rhetoric, but the one condemning the women/men involved for their different aggregate preferences seems to be you.

More philosophically, there are compelling reasons to favor "equality of opportunity" and "freedom of choice" over any "equality of outcome" that can only be achieved through coercion and discrimination. At the very least, if someone doesn't want to do something of their own accord, it is hardly doing them a favor to coerce them into changing. And from where comes our moral standing to judge the preferences of other people anyway?
Exactly. Leave it to someone with a PhD in biology to decide that biology is the only possible true hypothesis on why a correlation exists
It would be great if you could point to documents proving all your assumptions on bias. People have been so vehement about their beliefs. But there has never been a succint summarization of the proof. If it's so self evident, someone with decent writing skills would have whipped up a document like the manifesto for the general arguments with proof of bias right?

The thing is, if you don't believe those assumptions, you will view the the unconscious bias and diversity programs as discriminatory. And many people don't believe those assumptions. They see companies discriminating against them and they don't like it.
> Ellen Pao’s gender-discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2015 also brought the issue to light

Oh yeah, when does that go to verdict? Guessing it's still pending as this is all the article had.
Maybe you only consider as "software business" the kind of "software businesses" of VC fame today, like Facebook, Google, and the tons of web based ones, where huge investments are needed for the scaling and infrastructure?

I think the parent has in the mind the more traditional (but still widely present outside the VC echo chamber) model of a company writing some software package and selling it.

(Of course some people don't believe making $5 or $10 or $100 millions a year, as successful such companies do, qualifies as a success, but that's another story).
Ask HN: DevOps as service
So the past weeks I've been working on a product for startups and companies transitioning out of the startup mode.

Many probably remember being in "one big server" mode or "just bash and install mode".

And that's where the product comes in: it let's you import existing servers and transform that into a beautiful DevOps version.

Now roast me

On a serious note, for those just crafting a new startup my project can also spin up fully working infrastructure for running a modern Dev company.

Personally I love it because it is what I would have wanted in all the startups I founded but what do you guys think?

Honest opinions please.
> what a democracy should look like.

The definition of democracy varies, but if we use the regular definition of "liberal democracy" (a.k.a. western democracy) which is what we are used to define democracy as in the west, then it requires not only free and fair elections but also separation or power, and an informed public with free press.

Going from a liberal democracy into something else is unfortunately quite easy.

Step one is usually to suppress the free press, step 2 is attacking the judiciary and changing the constitution e.g. to control courts, give more power to the executive.

Populism is usually just a vehicle for this slow coup.

One might of course argue that "western democracy" isn't superior to other forms of democracy (or non-democracy) but that's a separate discussion. Both Poland and Turkey had liberal/western democracy to some extent, and are losing it to something else.
Realistically, even 100 conservative leaning employees aren't going to make a dent in the 60,000 person company that is google. I'd probably be blip on their normal attrition rate.

While I think that many outlets are misrepresenting and selectively quoting the piece to make it seem more offensive than it is, the reality is that the author used a lot of loaded language and created many opportunities for misinterpretation.

If this were at my company and the article didn't blow up online I'd probably have a talk with the author to point out all the ways that this piece could easily be misinterpreted and construed as offensive and that the same ideas can be conveyed in ways that are a lot less likely to blow up in your face. If this were at my company the article did go viral like it did in real life, I'd probably let this employee go. While I would say this is placing the interests of the company over the psychological safety of my employees, the pragmatic reality is that PR and potentially internal dissent caused by retaining the employee does not outweigh the moral win of retaining an employee who wrote a tone-deaf article that went viral and was widely perceived as offensive - even if the underlying ideas aren't ourageous.
Hmmm.

"The area of the plane will depend on the length of the pencils". Surely the area of the plane is infinite? The area of the _parallelogram_ will depend on the length of the pencils.

And I can't see how "you can assign an orientation to the plane" other than by changing the directions of the pencils. Again this description sounds like it refers to the parallelogram, not the plane.

And I don't know what a rotor is.

But other than that, I'm doing great.
Source data here. Who knows if it is representative, but 282 anonymous respondents have chimed in. The distribution looks like what I would expect.

https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "who defines where that partiality starts and ends?". I'm not advocating that anybody be deciding it.

Here's my understanding. If a company posts a job and receives 30 applications from women and 70 applications from men, you need to explain the reason for the disparity. Why is there such a difference? I think it's generally accepted that in this case in the software field, the majority of the disparity is due to cultural/social factors. And there are a lot of programs dedicated to outreach, education, raising interest, etc to counteract these societal factors. And I think these are good!

The point I was replying to was whether or not some of the difference in application rates could be explained because women, as a distribution of individuals, have a lower percentage that are interested in a particular type of job than men, perhaps due to biological factors. I don't think there are any conclusive studies that have shown this to be a significant effect, but for the sake of argument, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider. Of course, if it's not backed up by the evidence, then I won't continue looking at it.

I think one of the many issues with the memo was that it significantly overplayed speculative (and incorrect) biological factors, while ignoring the many social and cultural factors that we know to be the cause of most of the lack of diversity.
Speaking about Mussolini at the beginning it was democratic, then it became a dictatorship starting with the march on Rome.
Hitler took a similar path.
And I can see the same thing happening in Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro.
I don't know in detail the current situation in Poland to express an informed judgement, but as a rule of thumb populism in a democratic country may be the starting point of a dictatorship.
For real, it's hard to get 40% of people to even take a survey.
I think the point is you 'wrote' bulk of the code on paper. There weren't keyboard interfaced computers as common as they are today.

So once some programmer writes the code/flowchart, and gives it you on a paper. Its supposed to converted to punch cards/switches/whatever and then fed to a computer. The difference between the former and latter now is huge. The latter job is now nothing more than being a glorified typewriting kind of work.

I realized this when I was doing some really complicated GUI work on an embedded system. I was programming all the time on paper, I was doing it a lunch table, during transit, thinking during shower etc etc. After working several papers worth of programming, I converted it to C code, a few hundred to may be a thousand+ lines.

The real job of writing C code was largely a ritual that took like a few hours. Working out the algorithm was real programming that spanned a few days.

I could see how early programming went. Plenty of algorithm writing and unit testing through induction on paper.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Oh, were you serious?

Yeah there is a lot you really can't say publicly around here but is that so different than anywhere else? Overall the Bay is awesome and in general I am a flaming liberal but there are times when the right wing bogeyman of authoritarian PC orthodoxy is real and this is one of those times IMO. But it isn't like anywhere else is any better. Look at what the NFL is doing to Colin Kaepernick for desecrating the great temples of right wing "Murca" culture - any football stadium. The Bay does not have a monopoly on this so I wouldn't judge the area too harshly for this one disgusting moment of mob stupidity (IMO).
>The "social justice" movement dates back, uh, centuries

IMO the meaning of the term has changed. The "social" in the contemporary definition of "social justice" stands for social media. When I see "social justice", I think of people having their careers and personal lives put on trial, and the court is the internet itself.
40% of how many employees total? And which ones? Only the ones on certain discussion boards? That's a pretty biased sample.
Yes, it was undemocratic. A democracy is more than just an election by majority rule.

Almost all dictators hold elections. If an elected official cracks down on dissent and imprisons his or her rivals, the government is no longer democratic, even if it's done with the people's consent.

True democracies require free and fair elections, protection of human rights, respect for pluralism, and equal treatment of all citizens under the law.

These are the values shared by the 70+ democratic governments that govern nearly half of the world's population.
>What? As far as I know you shouldn't put your gender, age or photo in the CV because the company who review it can be sued for discrimination. (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies).

You're not being misinformed, this is probably good advice.

Your demographic information doesn't have to be on your CV for your name to be cross referenced with a government database (audits I mentioned are done by government offices or government contractors), which you would probably be listed in if you are working in the US.

>Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).

I haven't read anything about any audits that have said they have a significant bias one way or another, I don't think I've said anything to suggest otherwise.

Google and other large corporations are known to do self audits of their hiring practices (demographic and otherwise) both to improve their hiring processes as well as to identify and correct discriminatory practices (mitigate legal risk), they are allowed to collect demographic information for the latter purpose.[0]

[0]https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

My personal opinion is that Google's demographics changes are a simple result of changes in the actual applicant pool, and that Google 'promoting diversity' doesn't change their internal hiring process in any meaningful way. But the press about it probably does encourage lesser represented people to join CS majors in university. So google does promote diversity in engineering, just not in the way the author of that article suggests, and instead with marketing and a 4 year time lag.
Features I Want in an Web Tier and ORM
This article is a pleasure to read. Clear arguments and discussions to the point. A complete opposite of what many, if not most, commentators say.
So much of what passes for liberal thought these days is so divorced from common sense.

My personal view about diversity and gender identity is simple: you do what you are good at and what you enjoy. The moment doing X or Y becomes a compulsion for a gender rather than a choice, you have a problem.

If you're a man and you enjoy crocheting and want to be a nurse, you go do that. If you're a woman and you like coding, you do that.

If you're a man and you're stronger than your spouse, you move the couch. If not, the woman moves the couch. My wife is taller than I am. I ask her to get things that I can't reach. I don't puff up and get all masculinist about it - it's just damn common sense.

"Do what you're good at. Do what you enjoy". Simple as that.
If you want to do the cleaning yourself, the "uncleaned" data is here: http://berkeleyearth.org/data/

Source observations are provided as originally reported and will contain many quality control and redundancy issues. Intermediate data is constructed from the source data by merging redundant records, identifying a variety of quality control problems, and creating monthly averages from daily reports when necessary.

You can choose to use breakpoint adjusted or not, the data is all there.
Perception vs. reality

The general perception is that programming is a socially isolating, boring, monotonous job where you stare at a screen all day.

People making career choices don't know about the lax environment.

So tech completely aligns with what he/she wrote.

edit: and your sarcasm is hostile
Also, I'd mention that, even if, say, you have a noisy (presumably cheap) test that you give to everyone, and then you give an absolutely perfect (presumably expensive) test to minorities that fail the first test... It's probably the case that, of the people who failed the first test due to noise but would pass the second test, most of them are just barely above the "passing" bar. Because it seems reasonable to guess that people way above the bar have a smaller chance of failing the noisy test than people just barely above the bar. The policy would then lower the average ability level for hired minorities (though it wouldn't bring it below the "bar").

How large this effect is depends on just how noisy the first test is and on how widely above the bar people's abilities range.
I guess they started a conversation. Should not have been fired then.
The Man Who First Played Godzilla Has Died
A similar, common issue is to not have the machine's hostname pointing to a valid IP address in /etc/hosts (99% of the time it should be loopback, some like to point it to a fixed eth0 address), which causes delays in various part of an otherwise fine OS.
I don't agree with the firing. This directly fuels the view point that free speech for liberals is valid as long as the views are palatable to liberals. Such things achieve nothing but pushes both sides further into their own echo chambers and the world into a deeper abyss. It sort of sends out a message that only certain viewpoints are allowed to be expressed freely. What we need rather is a fierce and open debate with views from all sides expressed freely.
How to build a SaaS application in 2017
My desk is trashed everyday and tidied at night with only the things I'll need for the next day left (knolled though I hadn't heard the term).

The top sheet of the pad has a context dump of what I was working on when I left, where I was stuck etc and a single action to take (usually an easy win).

I find that knowing exactly where to start the next day makes momentum easier to pick up and the process of deciding on what to do next morning gets work out my head so I can leave without dwelling on work.

Colleagues sometimes jok about it but their desks look like a grenade hit them and they often can't find anything so I'll take my approach.

I have my own office at work so I make sure that's tidy as well, th cleaners have been asked not to touch it (I prefer they don't move my stuff around)
Germany has proper separation of power, free press etc.
About the only thing that makes it undemocratic (in the sense of liberal democracy) is if takes away any of these foundations: suppresses media, takes away the independence of courts etc. Germany does neither. Whether the governing person or party is populist or extreme right or socialist or whatever doesn't matter.