skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one said the US used nukes to spare Japanese civilian deaths. They did it to end the war which was killing thousands of people a day from both sides, and that was before an invasion that would easily kill over a million people.

The Japanese leaders still thought they could negotiate an "honorable" surrender that would allow them to keep the lands they had brutally enslaved.

They still believed in the Kamikazi, the "Divine Wind" which destroyed the invasion fleet of the worlds most dominant and brutal military machine just before it could brutally subjugate Japan. They thought they could arm children, the elderly, housewives, or turn them into suicide bombers and kill so many of the invaders that the bloodbath would force the US to agree to their terms.

US leaders really had no choice. If they tried to wait out the Japanese without using the bomb, the family of every sailor and pilot who died in those many months would be rightfully angry. They'd be out for blood against the entire sitting US government in the next election. Just as the families of the hundreds of thousands of dead US soldiers would be, after finding out the US invaded without using the bomb.

By ending the war more quickly with the bomb, US leaders also saved the lives of an immense number of Japanese who were being fired-bombed, shot and starving in huge numbers.

General US Grant was renowned for fighting brutal battles of attrition intended to bleed the confederate armies of soldiers, between his forces and theirs his battles created casualties of 350,000 Americans. But before he was given total command of US forces nearly a half million had already been killed. He ended the war after one last bloody year that was costing nearly 200,000 lives a year, and killing civilians by the many thousands.
This clearly fails to grasp the concept of operability.
If we were to adopt this line of reasoning, constitutional rights go from being something that is clearly established and to be universally respected by all to a concept that is at the mercy of whichever angry mob would master the numbers big enough to topple all who oppose them.
By this line of reasoning, ethics and morality are just something based on strength in numbers rather than any other principle.

I guess mob mentality does rule after all.
No, but my grandfather owned a successful restaurant. Invested all the profits into real estate. Built an empire of 5mil+ as a Mexican immigrant. Towards the end, he had everything pretty automated by people he hired. Property managers for the rentals and a mix of family and a good restaurant manager for the restaurant. He would just come in on Sundays to count the money/accounting.

Side note. Our entire family has been destroyed by fighting over money. Money isn't everything. :)
I'm not one to root for people to be fired for holding what I'd consider dumb or ill-informed opinions, but at the same time, as a woman, do I actually want to work on a team with someone who thinks I'm biologically unsuited to the job I'm doing and who is presumably judging my work more harshly and waiting for me to fail at things, who may have the power to review me poorly and affect my long-term career prospects? Gee, that's a tough one. If you've never had to work all day, every day at an office with people who treat you like that, or had to worry about being judged not on how hard you work but on who you are, be thankful. And that's obviously not a great look for a company that's already being investigated for discrimination, so I'm not sure they really had much of a choice here. Bringing bad PR to your company and potentially exposing them to legal liability usually doesn't end well.
just in NYC because of its age. I don't think it's so bad in other big cities.

I don't care about the delays or capacity. I just wish NYC subway stations weren't so filthy. Yes, they've gotten better in the past 20 years, but every time I go to oversea, I'm reminded of how disgusting nyc subway is.
I monitor my blood pressure pretty closely, and noticed when my blood pressure medication changed between generic manufacturers, one particular manufacturer was less effective, and my pressure went up 10-15%.
In this thread: "I don't agree with what the scientists said so either they're cherry picked, or bad scientists, or right-wing"

Republicans on global warming: "I don't believe the results so it must be that scientists don't know what they're talking about or they're biased."

Can I join/found a pro-science party? Anyone want to join?
Frankly ascribing differences in career path and aptitude to biologics is unfounded. I'm unaware of any rigorous study which would indicate such (and we have the Soviets and Chinese who can speak to the contrary of his assertion).

That said, I don't agree with sacking someone because they said something unproven and because it can make people feel bad. I know some Googlers, men and women, and they tell me stories about people getting fired over small indiscretions (a bar, for example) and about people getting called in an office for saying off-handedly "lady" or girl. While not getting the same reprimand for saying guy or boy.

On the other hand belittling "middle America" is kind of a pastime with many a Googler. (When you point out that South Florida is heavily Hispanic and that those Hispanics vote republican, they find it hard to believe, for example.)
The studies disagree with you.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherma...
When I said "if I were a woman" I was talking about me. My personal opinion. I know that there are people that think differently.

I prefer to work for a company that was able to see my skills than other that hire me because other reasons. I think I would be happier and achieve more things this way. (Again, this is a personal opinion)
This is one of the top reasons I'm interested in having kids. I think I need my life randomized a bit more, but "the app that sends me to random facebook events" won't come see me for Christmas when I'm old.
There are many industries which have found value in specific people to do the paperwork and deal with process. I don't think it's needed under 10 or so people if you have a good team, but once you're we'll into the 20+ range, I don't understand why so many devs are so set against giving this type of work to someone else.

It's certainly not what I want to to be doing day-to-day, yet our tools aren't smart enough today for me to do well in a larger org without it.
I guess I'm thinking "regular people won't remember his name," but "regular people" and "hiring managers at large tech companies" are different groups.

I don't remember why, but I recently read some old blog posts about Joe the plumber (2008 election), so I've been thinking about how the public has a very short memory.
>>the GOP has changed substantially in recent years.

Both parties have.

Both have gotten more extreme and more polarized.

From Antifa to the "Alt-Right"

Saying that only the GOP has changed is only looking at one side.

>is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.

That is largely due to media coverage which only highlights the nutters from the GOP, never the Left, and never any Sensible Members. For example you spoke of Obama and how the GOp embraced the "racial joke" birther non-sense, did you ever see this video on your news of John McCain?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrnRU3ocIH4

Granted this is from the 2008 election and maybe that is outside your scope of "recent years"

There are just as many crazy people in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. and I say that as a supporter of the King of Crazy parties, Libertarian party, where we had a guy strip on the stage of the National Convention last year....

American Politics... when it stops being crazy I will be worried
This is both a misrepresentation of what happened and a misunderstanding of mathematical distribution.
As a minority woman in tech I'm not bothered much by his document, but that's only because I don't work with this guy or folks like him. His manifesto doesn't pain me, but that's only because I have a secure job coding all my favorite things with people who don't spew this kind of unsubstantiated crap to my colleagues, giving them spurious reasons to doubt my abilities and inherent qualities.

My sympathies are with those who work in more precarious situations. I'm no authoritarian, but I'm ok with this guy getting fired - he used his platform unwisely and at this point the damage control gained by firing him probably outweighs whatever benefit the company might get by keeping him.

However, I'm plenty perturbed by the willful lack of understanding all around these parts about (at the very least)
- how diversity programs work / what they do
- how hiring works
- how oppression works
- how public words can affect others
You can if the subject of the stereo-type is a "white dude-bro" or whatever.
SIX TRUMP’S ADVISORY COUNCIL MEMBERS ON HIV-AIDS RESIGN
You are being downvoted for saying James Watson knows little on genetics. Oh my god. Do you even realize what you are saying.
Who is judging them on merit? Mostly guys? Mostly girls? Or an sexless robot?
Sure, a 2 year old macbook isn't that old. I think they support them for 4 or 5 years so you're about half your life time there. Good for now but not really sustainable long term.
Well yea, if perception of chess skill corresponds with actual chess skill then it means people are capable of self evaluating chess skill.

But that's not your example. If your example was self reported depression correlates with clinically diagnosed depression, we now know that people can self-perceive depression the same as clinicians diagnose it.

Your example is self-reported neuroticism corresponds with depression. So what? How are we any closer to knowing if we measured neuroticism? Is there a pre-existing link between neuroticism and depression? How did they measure neuroticism to establish that link?
Wow. I have so much to say about this, but I'd rather not be publicly crucified for this.

Chilling indeed, so much for free speech and rational discussion.
Which is demonstrably untrue; women elect into different fields. The "yeah but sexism..." argument doesn't hold water because women achieved parity in the medical and legal professions in a time of actual, blatant sexism and well before every company had million dollar diversity budgets.

The strawman is much better than the actual argument.
I agree with your point that systemic discrimination is a problem, but I'm not sure that affirmative action programs are as simple as "stepping it down". I get that as things normalize group A will feel like they're being discriminated against, but I think that's precisely the reason affirmative action programs are controversial -- they're hard to distinguish from just discrimination in the other direction. Maybe that's the only option available, that discussion is long and nuanced.

I also agree that most hiring practices are crap, and that interviews don't properly reflect day-to-day work. I also agree with a point (I think) you made that a bunch of the "meritocratic" tests that are developed today are a lot of the time just checking if one was groomed in the same way (learned about algorithms the same way, learned the same practices, etc) and not necessarily pure can-you-get-shit-done tests.

Your point gets a little hazy towards the bottom, for me, I can't tell if you're against supposedly meritocratic tests altogether and suggesting that people test for team-fit more. Your last sentence seems to have that same off-putting insinuation, just crystalized, but I think I understand your point, maybe I can rephrase it:

"If you're measuring a candidate with what you think is a meritocratic skills based tests, it's easy to be blinded by inherent bias and support systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because many seemingly meritocratic skills based tests have more to do with confirming shared experiences/biases than checking actual skill."

If I did indeed read your point well, my response would be to conduct better interviews, and create an actually meritocratic interview process, the onus is on the company.
I've been obsessively watching the rise of the social justice movement over the past 4 years, ever since Donglegate, and I keep wondering when that correction will come. But it only seems to rise. You would have good reason to believe that we're witnessing a torrentous societal change taking place, rather than a passing fad.

After the last election, though, I'm done with making predictions :)
For what it's worth, there's probably a lower personal cost for a leftist to be sincere in a conservative environment than it is for a conservative to be sincere in a liberal environment.

http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...

Liberals are more likely to defriend someone over politics. Extrapolate that as you will.
The example of $1 to $2 was a deliberate exaggeration really. It still seems to me that if something is a good investment, you are less likely to want to sell it now. The better Bitcoin seems as an investment, the more people can be expected to lean towards holding instead of spending.
Sorry, I was mistaken. I looked up the quote: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence

One of my favorite parts of “What You Can’t Say”:

> Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of
his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology,
not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.

That's quite a bit different from calling it her favorite. Anyway, I was only curious.
Ah, that makes sense.

Still, this is a more general issue that hate crimes. Each state (and the federal government) are considered separate entities, which means that double jeopardy does not prohibit being tried for the same crime multiple times, so long as you are being tried by different states (or the federal government). It is not nessasary to have a hate crime for this principle to be invoked. It is also not unreasonable by modern standards to disagree with this; it is just an odditiy of the American legal system that most people never think about.
I believe their game plan is more hardware based differentiation rather than software alone. From that perspective, TensorFlow will probably play a similar role to Google's Cloud that DirectX played to Microsoft Windows. As other cloud vendors aren't THAT far behind (notably Microsoft), I don't believe Google will win with that high of a margin, if it wins.
This is besides the point. The point is, the author did not say that unqualified diverse candidates are accepted at a higher rate than unqualified non-diverse candidates. Many people are using this statement (often excluding the last couple words specifically referring to the false-negative rate) to claim that the author calling his women and racially underrepresented co-workers under qualified.

For what it's worth, I do think that taking steps to decrease the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an okay system and I explain my company's process of doing this in another comment in this page. That said, pointing out that this system is increasing the false-negative rate for non-diverse candidates is 1) factually correct, and 2) not at all the same thing as calling my underrepresented co-workers unqualified. If somebody claimed that our interview process increased the false positive rate for underrepresented groups I would object to such a statement - but that is not what is said in this document.
The author clearly stated that he wasn't denying that sexism exists. Another example of how the manifesto is inconsistent, unless he's saying that sexism exists but somehow has no effect on hiring.
It's not exactly clear from your comments so I'll just ask: is an employer ever justified in firing an employee for expressing their viewpoint?
This is a really important point here.

I will strongly defend people's right to hold differing opinions, even extremely controversial ones.

But this guy did not take the right approach. He wrote a freaking 'manifesto' and published it fairly publicly.

Diversity initiatives are a very touchy subject, and if you are going to approach them, you need to do it as carefully and tactfully as possible.

What he did was neither careful, nor tactful, and whether he is 'right' or not is completely besides the point.
Huh?

Spreading your legs doesn't exactly require a detailed training regime. Electricians and plumbers have challenging jobs that require a lot of training. Changing out electric sockets doesn't make you an electrician.
If you were trying to learn math, your shouldn't be reaching for a calculator everytime when there's a difficult arithmetic problem.

A debugger is the same. Use it when you've mastered skill of desk checking code, and understand how to make hypothesis about where bugs might be and binary search with prints to debug.

When actually developing software, you then reach for the debugger for convenience. But the skills learnt above is still very useful, and is in fact a good way to learn how to problem solve.

If you only ever relied on a debugger, it'd be like only knowing how to use calculator and no mental arithmetic.
He was fired for effectively casting doubt on whether his colleagues were qualified for their work or whether they were just hired to meet diversity quotas.
Nope -- unfortunately, the voting analogy is a poor way to understand ultrafilters. Essentially, filters (a dual to ideals) are structures that tell you which subsets of a partially ordered set are "big", and ultrafilters are maximal filters. A pathological example that can help illuminate the idea is that of a principal ultrafilter ("on x"), which is all subsets of a partially ordered set containing x as a least element. The elements of the ultrafilter are the majorities, and their complements the minorities -- clearly the union of two sets not containing x will not contain x, and the intersection of two sets containing x will always contain x.

Choice gives you the existence of a nonprincipal ultrafilter, that is, a structure on the integers without a specific least element which correctly identifies all "big" subsets of the integers in a way that provides that the intersection of "big" sets is still "big". I'd highly recommend the treatment in Just and Weese if you're interested in learning more.
Looks much cleaner.

Again, I really like the project and encourage you to dive deeper into progamming language theory.
Please correct me if I err - it's been some time since my college statistics class.

It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].

In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.

I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.

1. http://www.prolekare.cz/dbpic/jp_5403_f_21-x1000_1600
Basically just said the same things -- see my response.

I think what they were trying to get across was that BECAUSE of the broken testing, tests that were supposed to be meritocratic are just checking for certain groupthink.

My response there was if that's the case, the problem is just making better (actually strictly meritocratic) tests.
Feel free to get specific.
I think you should reread that article. It is stating that this woman, someone who is already successfully integrated into the "Tech Scene" is not the problem to be solved by outreach. Which is true. That doesn't mean that she would be insulted by outreach to women. It means you shouldn't ask her how to do it.
My view is that in the absence of accessible ways to fact-check the memo people will only see the memo and the gnashing of teeth surrounding it. That leaves a really big hole to be filled - the memo is already out there in a big way.

The is Google lol, not some guy from i hate women dot com. Perhaps based on his platform alone we can consider it an honest attempt at conversation and debate it with our own honesty.
> tons of other studies[1] contradict these conclusions

[1]citations needed
What we all in tech are forgetting is that this gender gap exists in all fields, including medicine. The more interesting problem with medicine is that the pipeline is basically at equity (close to 50/50 male/female graduates).

However, according to this article (https://amino.com/blog/how-the-gender-gap-is-shifting-in-med...) even medicine is seeing severe gender gaps based on the specialty that is chosen.

This was their analysis:

Only 7% of all orthopedic surgeons; 15% of orthopedic surgeons beginning their practice in 2015

9% of urologists; 21% of urologists beginning their practice in 2015

13% of cardiologists; 25% of cardiologists beginning their practice in 2015

Why are there so few women working in these specialties? According to Mayo Clinic's Ian Mwangi, “There’s a stereotype that orthopedic surgeons are jocks, that the field requires brute strength.” There’s a lengthy feature article on Orthopedics Today that explores other reasons women aren’t entering orthopedics, including less exposure to the field in medical school, discouragement among advising faculty and deans, and the perception of poor work-life balance.

NPR explains that there may be gender disparity among urologists because of a "misconception of the field ... that urologists treat male problems like prostate cancer and erectile dysfunction."

Women seeking a career in cardiology face similar deterrents, including the “impairments to family planning, poor work-life balance, and perceived radiation risks,” according to this fellows' perspective published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.

In most of my research, I found that a lack of female role models was also a key reason why more women didn’t enter these specialties, echoing a trend across industries. Doximity reports that women represent only 22% of physician leaders.
I've never encountered a programming exercise which was completely objective, outside of pure instructionals.

Engineering has large degrees of opinion mixed into any non-rudimentary implementation.
> this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex.

No, he started that Google's hiring practices are biased towards certain candidates. If that causes offense, it should be directed at those in charge of hiring practices, not the guy who reported them.
They can confirm that he was correct in a subset of his factual claims, but not in the further factual claims that he builds on those. Implying that they can is bad science.
> The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job.

No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_.

They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google?

[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...

> Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.

African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.

She points to the second column.

“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”

The last column draws gasps.

Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
What you found is correlation not causation. The cause is probably deeper, for example, lower IQ.