skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not contentious. The facts are clear. It took an extraordinary turnabout by the Emperor to even consider surrender, and that only happened after the two bombs. Before the bombs the Japanese leaders believed they could force the US to accept a peace where they kept most of the lands they had enslaved.

The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren't even the most deadly of the war. The US had burned most of Tokyo to the ground and more was coming.

Japanese citizens were going to die in masses when the invasion force hit the beach. Either sacrificing themselves in suicide attacks, or being used as human shields.
Out of curiosity, if his "manifesto" had talked about white privilege and how many of his white, male co-workers had, for their entire lives, been the beneficiaries of massive disparities in American society that led them to have an increased chance of becoming Googlers, and argued that we should work to ameliorate those disparities at all levels of society, including during the hiring process at Google, would you still call for his termination?

Such a claim would, after all, be an insult to many of his coworkers, who might feel as if he believes they're only at Google because society lowered the bar for them.

Personally I'd like it if people could make both arguments in a reasonable fashion and not jump immediately to outrage and calls for termination.
Sure. That's why I said women are capable of performing those jobs. Some women pass the Marine fitness tests and firefighter physical requirements. Hence, women are capable of performing any physically strenuous job.

But again, this is completely the wrong rabbit hole in the context of this discussion. It has nothing to do with the fact that men and women have equal capacity to do any mental work.
Are you saying that someone stopping to be your friend, or someone not wanting to have you as an employee is equivalent to the government killing you?
Targeted outreach is not remotely close to supporting a caste-based system of employment. I'd even argue that it's aiding people break out of the social and gender expectations, which can be viewed as an informal caste. I realize I might be making a massive generalization of South Asian history by comparing gender & racial roles with the caste system, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's enabling people to overcome social expectation.

I do agree that there are ways to implement this incorrectly, and my support is contingent on the following:

* Working with minorities in a field does not mean refusing to work with the majority. To ground this in the world of tech, reaching out to girls and underrepresented minorities does not mean turning away Asian & white boys.

* Steering them towards STEM should leave the agency in their hands. Even in the absence of all social and cultural pressure, it's a stretch to assume that we'll have gender parity in all fields. I'm confident in saying that software development(I specifically point out software development since some STEM fields have parity or even a slight majority representation of women) would have a greater representation than it does now, but I don't think it's 50%. If diversity initiatives end up pressuring people into fields they don't want to be in, then that's a failure in and of itself.
I love how the Right has co-opted persecution rhetoric, well done.
If you were a woman, you might think that being hired under a diversity initiative is okay, given that the alternative is not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring.
Google's data suggests a modest increase this year over last year (a 1% shift in overall tech gender roles) with better improvements in leadership. They publish the data, so you can see.

So evidently Google can demonstrate modest improvement. And it sure seems like the Guy Who Got Fired felt like he was seeing the undeserving and huddled masses approaching his ivory tower.

But I'm not sure exactly what you'd like. On the one hand, "Someone needs to do something" and on the other "this blatantly favors one class of people." But I'm not entirely sure that last part is true. Google has quietly improved a lot of feminist hot-button issues that benefit men disproportionately in the last 3 years as well.

For example, Google increased its paternity leave policy. I know because one of the folks I met while interviewing there was ecstatic about it. They've also taken a lot of steps to improve life for families. I know because while interviewing I toured the day care facilities. Hell, Google quietly helps employee kids get into nearby schools and funds (and even runs) after school activities. You don't even need a woman involved to trigger them, Google offers its -ternity leave to adopters as well.

These things disproportionately benefit men by the simple fact that there are many more men in the workforce at Google, so any family related benefits or policies (and these are important, real issues that deserve to be solved) are really a massive win for men who want offspring.

So this whole angle about biases towards "specific groups" is really just a terrible prism. While I'm not saying this is your angle, it's all too often used as a way to shut down any sort of concessions for minorities with unique challenges.

And the business value is really, really clear: a larger workforce means more supply and less demand. From a large business's perspective, the 5 year operating costs of these programs is tiny compared to the savings a 5% reduction in minimum hiring costs would be.
>That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified?

It depends on if that bias existed or not. If the bias exists then of course, I would want to have that bias compensated for. The question is still: is there a bias? Many people say the disparity alone is evidence of a bias because a completely unbiased system would result in a 50/50 split which we obviously don't have. The author of the manifesto is saying that a bias doesn't exist because the disparity has another explanation with some scientific support.

You might disagree or think that the science which supports this idea is faulty in some way. But come on, the reaction has been outrageous and scary.
Sorry, which author? I was talking about Prof. Miller's thought experiment here about his perceived conflict between gender equality and diversity.
B isn't the argument being made by diversity advocates, that's just the strawman created by people like yourself.

You can fix it by changing it to

b) Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.

edit: HN comments eat double asterisks???
So he's fired for asking the question? It's a very reasonable thing to ask. I've worked for companies that have instituted such policies -- minority candidates were given an HR-sanctioned "saving throw" before being rejected. It's not a good feeling to wonder if your new colleague would have been rejected if she were male, or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color.
Again, my argument here is simple: it is hard to think of a horrible thing you could say that you couldn't justify using the logic you presented upthread, which makes your argument seem pretty unpersuasive.
In general also see some other factual problems with his history backdrop arguments as well, besides PC and the arguably simplified popular history version narrative in the retelling of the Galileo Affair.

In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. And published it just before his death. So was Galileo himself deeply embedded in christianity trying to resolve the conflicts within the system. He didn't see himself as heretic, that was a label applied to him by others. The pope actually asked him to pursue his research on heliocentrism on a hypothetical level.

The Ludendorff reference seems overblown at least, as some picked up tidbits by a 3rd party retelling of history. Maybe he mixed it up with the so called Stab-in-the-back myth that happened after the war.
The 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution was never popular with the already quasi-dictatorial OHL, so it never needed a purge in that sense. The events in Russia led people to believe an annexation victory Siegfrieden was possible at some point so the resolution got obsolete at some point.

The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. Huh? So seem Americans if seen from Europe.

Stalin and Hitler (who else of all people not name-dropped yet) are singlehandedly responsible for the claimed demise of representational art, not the advent of photography and film (aren't those two representational by the choice of medium already)? Maybe it simply got boring for artists for a while?
Yeah Gizmodo went "ruh-roh, this guy's argument is making too much sense, better fix that!"
If you are a scientist, and publishing in a peer review journal, I think you are close to correct. If you are a dilettante coming to de novo conclusions about controversial topics, you probably aren't qualified to declare something as science.
Maybe I should have added: In absence of anything that probe you are a hacker in biology.
And what is wrong with being emotional?
Maybe, but it doesn't mean we should promote it. Half of these comments are positively jubilant about the whistleblower's termination.
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.
> Nobody is being insulted by this.

Some people are insulted by this [0]. When I said these programs already do disempower women, I wasn't speaking for all women: I was referring to what I had read. We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.

[0] https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a-wom...
Right now the most common x86 CPU which implements the SHA instructions is AMD's Ryzen. The only available Intel CPU which supports them is Goldmont, the latest generation of Atom CPU. It seems likely that Cannon Lake and possibly Coffee Lake will also implement them, but I haven't seen any rumors pointing one way or the other.
There's a whole host of tests and services where price transparency would be easy. Billing simplification too (if the hospital picks the radiologist, they should pay the radiologist out of the fixed fee they charge for the xray...)
People love linking to Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay in this context. [...] 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.

Why do you feel it's his worst essay? People generally regard it as one of his best. Jessica said it's her favorite, for example.

It's difficult to infer from this thread why it's his worst. Rather than guess, I thought I'd ask.
This is easy to do: add a cryptographic signature to your blog posts (you can use a self-signed cert; the signature just proves that the person who signed various documents had control of the private key in a particular key pair). I think the only obstacle is convincing readers that there's some value in having that digital signature.
The enhancement aspect is jurisdiction-specific. I should have added "federal" in front.

Most often when we hear about hate crimes, it is regarding a separate federal case, prosecuted independently from the local or state case.
There are differences in chimps about the propensity of genders to pick certain types of toys (train or doll iirc).

By contrast, the differences in racial averages in genetic makeup is often less than the genetic differences between two individuals of the same race.
This is a ridiculous standard for an employer. He has at will employment, they can fire him and he can also leave if he dislikes their diversity programs. Regardless of his thesis, a private employer has no duty to support any/all speech from their employees to other employees during business hours and using their business resources (which all of this was). It is perfectly legitimate, 100% protected first amendment speech to tell your boss to go f-ck themselves at work, or to call a customer a piece of sh-t to their face, but don't expect your employer to support you for it.
It's hard for me to follow your argument.

> By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap.

Agreed.

> People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself.

Presumably, you mean the bias is toward white males. But then you go on to say your preferred method is a soft-skills developer test that the team who'd be working with the hire evaluates.

Great--that's how hiring should be done anyway.

> And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed.

Okay, if that's how it worked out for you, great. The whole point of any hiring process is to determine which people will be the best fit for your needs. If your method does this, then it's a good method.

> If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.

This is where your argument breaks down. You started out talking about unearned privileges, but your whole argument is about how you test for desired skills, and then somehow in the end, you make it about race again (but this time as it relates to meritocratic hiring, not unearned privilege).

So...where does race fit in to your hiring process? To me, that part of it just sounds like pandering, since your actual process sounds like it's all skill-based anyway.
He wrote a manifesto giving some actual biology facts and he wasn't talking about CS but something more close to biology (or at least from the point of view of biology)
> couldn't it be better listen to the opinions of women in tech

Need it be either/or? Can't we listen to all the stakeholders in this attempt to change the culture for the better?

EDIT: Quoted relevant section of parent for context.
The insurers often have PBM contracts that incentivize them in filling specific drugs. This is the most likely reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
> 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.

There's something missing in your perspective which is that redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc are political strategies that have been used by every party in the USA since the late 1700s. Gerrymandering was named after one of the signers of the constitution. The Democratic Party had a solid control of congress for several decades in the 1900s due to gerrymandering (voting districts redrawing). The filibuster was used by democrats as well and as the senate passed back and forth between GOP and Democratic control, each side used it more than the last time.

Now, a lot of noise has been made in recent years in the media about these tactics because the GOP happened to be in a position in 2000 and 2010 to gerrymander the districts themselves, but it's nothing new.

I guess regarding the birth certificate thing, credulity for conspiracies is nothing new among the GOP party base. In the 1990s they were convinced that Bill Clinton had dozens of people murdered to cover up his crimes ("Clinton body count").
Those scientists specifically studied gender differences so they can at least confirm the Google author was actually correct in his factual claims.

Where anyone can disagree is how he interprets them, but I am glad to see four experts clarify a little bit about what is true.
While you're not doing this at all, I think there's sort of a conflation between diversity policies at specific companies and diversity in the industry when in reality they're totally unrelated. So I'm my opinion there's a lot of misplaced support for corporate diversity policies which are designed to benefit he corporation, not women or minorities. And the people being discriminated against under thes policies can't openly oppose them or they'll be accused of bigotry and probably fired.
I doubt he has a strong case, but several Californian lawyers would be happy to file a nuisance lawsuit anyway.
The company culture is really starting to fall apart. I wouldn't be surprised to see internal changes structurally to teams. Managers should manage but not be able to pick their team.
>It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions.

But "we're somehow secretly and unknowingly discriminating in our hiring process" doesn't need such justification before using it to make decisions?
>But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption.

In California, when companies are audited by the government to check for discriminatory employment practices, they're checking that the employment ratios are relatively close to the ratio of the pool of applicants, not some prescribed ratio like 50/50.
The Constitution of Mexico is probably the best written in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Mexico
Left is an alternative to right. Right is the opposite of left. They are alternatives, yet defined in terms of each other. You can't know one without the other.

Doesn't seem contradictory to me...
I have a feeling that if race truly played a preferential role in hiring engineers, we would see more than 1% of tech roles being filled by Black engineers at Google. ;)

https://www.google.com/diversity/
> You don't get to wave a magic want and say "I'm using FACTS so you're wrong!!"

You just described a large portion of my Facebook feed. (Yes, I will admit my own guilt here as well).
Going to piggyback with a question unrelated to yours but tangental to the topic:

What about the universes in the multiverse where 'multiverse theory' is wrong, and there is no multiverse? Are they islands? Are they like multiverse 'diodes' which may allow only one-way travel into that universe, but from which return to the larger multiverse is impossible?
> With money from where?

Your salary, invest you savings in the market.
Why does it all have to be equal? Why can't we acknowledge that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses in different areas? The whole point of diversity is not to make everyone the same, it is to appreciate the differences everyone brings.
I don't understand why people think that reframing things as disputes about "genetically-influenced behavioral traits which are observable in aggregate across genders" is such a powerful argument. We all know what that means. We get it: he's not biased against any one individual woman, just against the statistical distribution women come from. Replacing the word "misogyny" with 10 Latinate jargon words isn't an argument; it's just bad writing.
How exactly is it possible to have discriminatory practices without practicing discrimination? It honestly seems like you're saying the guy isn't a bigot because grammar.
> you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar

It only hurts because it is plausible and causes self-doubt.

But Google can prove this conclusively just by plotting the distribution of performance reviews between "diversity hires" and the regular pool of employees. You either show that there are negligible differences (the diversity program works) or the guy is right (the average bar did get lowered).

Google will never publish this data because they are cowards.
You can get all this info off Zillow. Not sure what the concern is.
It was Harvard alumni with PhDs who wrote the piece of crap that is The Bell Curve in the 90s. A Harvard PhD guarantees neither accuracy nor correctness.
Cutting a check for 3-6 months severance as a sign of good faith, wrapped up in an NDA. There's no cause for anything more than that.
I'm actually self employed, and I got this health care policy on the health care exchanges - there's no employer in the picture, which is probably why they're trying to shift the cost to me, as opposed to paying for the brand.

So really, without an employer, it's just because there's no financial incentive for them to do so. Actually, it's negative incentive for them, because they tried to get me to pay for something they wouldn't have to pay anything for. Then for dispensing it, they charge me since they are also the pharmacy.
Well, I have basically nothing but respect for Jessica Livingston, but if that's what she believes, she's wrong about that. She had to be wrong about something eventually!

I'm pretty sure this isn't what Graham meant to write, but the only thing I ever see people take away from that essay is "the worst ideas are unfairly maligned". Judge the essay for its actual impact on the marketplace ideas. What's the good that's come of it?
I have zero opposition for efforts to educate and train women and minorities. I want the actual problem to be fixed, not just used as an excuse to advance one group's interests at the expense of another in zero-sum games.
Having a dumb opinion is fine, but enacting laws that force others to abide by your stupid opinions is not. There's a huge difference.

It's fine to argue about where the line should be drawn, but pretending the line doesn't exist is just as dangerous.
> This is simply a matter of the constitution not going far enough

I don't have to hear obscenities on my private property.

There's also freedom of association. It seems weird to me that one would be against authoritarianism when it comes to freedom of speech but be blindly for authoritarianism when it comes to association. I won't and can't judge whether the firing of that googler was justified but shareholders of google should have the right to fire whoever they bloody want.