skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, his thesis was that the gender gap can be explained by biology.

Verbatim, from the manifesto:

"For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."

The way he explains it with biology is that he rattles off a bunch of micro-facts, and then uses 'logic' with a big sprinkling of bias, to reach amazing macro-conclusions.
The bit that leaves out is that this already happens without affirmative action.
I'm a true full stack developer. Having masteres backend and front end over 20 years.

Author can fuck themselves
Charlie Munger: How to Teach Business School (2012)
"Healthcare, like, the mandatory profits for insurance companies?"

Like the end to discrimination against pre-existing conditions. Like the end to yearly and lifetime caps on coverage. Like the end to insurance companies just being able to drop you the minute you get sick.

"Immigration is a loaded topic."

No, it's not.

"And calling an argument intellectually lazy is being "intellectually lazy" itself."

No, it's not. It's pointing out the faults in your argument.

"You're delusional if you think the Democrats and Republicans by and large have any real interest in the American people."

And you're far too cynical if you think they don't, or if you think that they're the same.

"If you vote Democrat you're just as bad (maybe worse since you should know better) as Republicans."

Wrong. No matter how much you hope that they're the same, they are not. Again, all it takes is looking at the various issues facing people today. Healthcare. Immigration. Minority rights. Voting rights. For you to say they are equally as bad is for you to say you have never actually looked at anything, and want an excuse not to.

I have absolutely no respect for lazy people like you who don't even bother to look at the issues, and just choose the easy way out. Do not bother responding back with another easily disproven and shot down argument.
The fact that those fields are undervalued (and often underpaid) is a huge part of this discussion that anyone who fights for diversity in tech is well aware of and has been saying long before this memo was released.
What evidence do we have of that?
> His firing makes sense: the CEO and HR are both acting to protect the company.

No. His firing confirmed part of Demore's thesis; that Google has monoculture issues and sits in some sort of bubble.

> This is the reality of business.

Is it? If that's true, we need to be much more aggressive about corporate consolidation because the only way to make room for diversity of opinion is to make sure that there's diversity of opinion at the corporate level.

If you quit Google because it's too (insert culture war concern here), which big tech employer is substantially different?
Is your assertion that being a teacher or a nurse is easier than SWE?
I've been involved in standardisation within my industry for some time, and it's interesting to see how many people representing vendors are able to sway proceedings away from that which is technically neutral (and non-proprietary), to that which is financially beneficial to one or more implementers of the standardisation procedure's results.

I see the same thing in play here - the airwaves are being treated like tracts of land, and those who currently own the larger tracts don't want anyone using the smaller plots of no-man's land on their borders, in case there are accidental (or otherwise) trespasses onto 'owned territory', so to speak.

I'm not advocating one way or another (if you own something, it's yours, clean and fair), but it's interesting to see how an invisible physical space is being monetized so aggressively.
Heather Heying: Should We “Stop Equating ‘Science’ with Truth”?
Hah, love the meta here.
Agreed. Science matters little for a business if it offends people who pay for the business or the people within the business. Even scientists themselves have issues with such results -- a part of the file drawer problem.

I guess a NYT columnist can say this because click-bait-y titles always help for revenue and Google does not stop giving the ad revenue when news articles are critical of its CEO. This looks like both parties doing their roles well enough.
One advantage I see is that you can automate/script/code the whole process, from top to bottom, including the means of payment, without needing individuals to sign up with credit cards or bank accounts, and without needing to trust third parties.

If costs and functionality are equivalent to our current solutions (like S3), then the cryptocurrency ecosystem is certainly better, but how much better is it? That is arguable and I would expect the developers to be inflating its value quite a bit.
Can we safely assume that people who literally march in solidarity with neo-Nazis lose the rhetorical privilege of objecting to comparisons between them and Nazis? (That doesn't make them "actual Nazis", it just makes the comparison germane).

Can we assume that if some duly constituted group --- whatever definition we choose --- sponsors a march in solidarity with neo-Nazis, and the group is not riven with dissent over that action, that it's germane to compare members of that group (or, at least, those who knowingly remain after the march) with Nazis? Again: the action isn't dispositive; it just means the comparison, right or wrong, isn't frivolous.
The legal definitions of a hostile work environment is not simply based on how something makes you feel. It is very unlikely a hostile work environment suit for not firing Damore based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.
I must have read a different memo than everyone else. The one I read said that the massive gender imbalance in software could be due to genetics, and because of that we shouldn't try to fix it with policy. But the reality is that there is a gender imbalance in software because of the way women are treated, and the best way to correct that is through policies that treat them better.

It shouldn't be a stretch to see that arguing against treating people respectfully is offensive.
The notice does not list the copyrighted works that are being infringed (I.e. made publicly available). This is the necessary element of a valid DMCA notice.
Where is this considered slang for lunatic? I've only heard this as slang for homosexual.
> By firing him they made him a hero to enormous groups,

To a small, vocal group.

> By doing it in an anti-science, anti-evidence way

There were good reasons for doing it that had nothing to do with science or evidence.

There are women working at Google who do not need to be reminded of the genetic and biologic differences they have from their cishet male counterparts.

If Damon had issues with the policies at Google there were many other channels open to him that didn't involve circulating a manifesto. He brought it upon himself. Once word of that memo leaked there was nothing for Google to do but fire him.
I've also read several supporting takes by scientists in related fields as well. The statements Damore made are indeed supported by some studies, and science being science, there are studies which conflict it as well.

Pretending 'science' supports one political view or another is the sort of thing that got us in this mess in the first place. I think if we're going to avoid being disingenuous, we need to recognize that there is not a widely accepted consensus on this topic.
Unless the fine/settlement is cheaper than keeping him, which it likely will be unless it results in some larger investigation or monitoring program.
We tried to address several distinct concerns with Coco: scalability, latency, confidentiality and governance. Scalability and latency are determined largely by the consensus model of the network. Our intent with Coco is to make consensus pluggable so that each network can make its own choices (via the Coco network constitution) about how to run their market.

I agree with you that the branding is tricky, in part because the dominant term "blockchain" is describing a specific data structure. The key point we wanted to convey with Coco is that we are trying to enable secure, performant, multi-party computation. We think there will be many models for this over time as TEEs come into wider use. "Blockchain" is just one of them.
I also didn't realize Cortex now owns Metafilter.
The default Arch install is about 700Mb. How is that shockingly small? If you do a minimal install on most distro's you'll get something similar. Probably less, as Arch bundles all it's packages together and you can't chose to, for example, not install the dev packages.

I use the OS myself, so I'm not hating on Arch linux but the misinformation spread about Arch is crazy.
If you think that any given woman would be dissuaded from pursuing a career in STEM by an essay that, using peer-reviewed scientific studies as supporting evidence, suggests that differences in interest levels across populations may partially but not totally explain why women as a population, not as individuals tend to choose STEM at a rate lower than men, aren't you helping advance the stereotype that women are delicate shrinking violets whose easily-hurt feelings keep getting in the way of their life goals?
Maybe you have unfounded biases against the NYT based on the propaganda outlets you get your information from.
Those exact issues finally got me to drop Win10 to run Linux on the desktop for the first time in most of a decade, and to not have Windows running on any of my machines for the first time since... god, 1992 or 1993? Something like that. Even the Win8 crapfest didn't make me abandon Windows. 10's bad.

And that's just my personal entertainment PC. I don't know how people who have to actually do work in that environment don't throw their machine off a balcony, or quit and go somewhere that lets them use a different OS. It's infuriating. I'd go nuts dealing with trying to be productive in Win10 5 days a week.
In our 5000 years of recorded History, the Leader gets the glory and/or the sword. Now a days, they do get Golden parachutes but attributing success to Leaders (and in many cases rightfully so) has not changed.
Are you saying that they are all equally at fault or all equally not at fault? If not, what's your point?
Agreeing with the memo or not, the author posted it in an internal forum.

The person who leaked the internal memo to the public caused the PR disaster.
Meanwhile, nursing as a profession is seeking more men to increase diversity as well.
Where are you looking at that?
> Anyone know why he's saying this?

Because their business model depends on it working.
They should send a piece of it to steve mre
Thanks, but that means I'm doing the testing. I wish I could do that - maybe someday.
So is your point that this journalist guy should just not write about it? That's his job. It's different from a CEO making a bad decision.
Just to clarify, you're saying this incident is illustrating that corporations have too much power?
Another benefit: they were even CO2-negative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...
Halfway through the article I got a huge popup with a button "Create your whiteboard". When I clicked it, I ended up on a 404 page - https://www.deekit.com/braintree-to-stripe/https
I imagine many data sets track surface.

Surface data in OpenStreetMap is pretty incomplete, but it is easy to add to a road and is well used when present (cycle routing is a popular use of OSM and avoiding soft and uneven surfaces is handy for cycle routing).
You are overlooking the fact that there is no actual DMCA violation in this case. The problem is that companies being bullied with frivolous DMCA threats will comply because it is easier than fighting it. Using a blockchain removes this as an option (and also makes the bullying pointless in the first place).
I too am late to the boom but I also don't see cryptocurrencies as investment vehicles per se. I wouldn't go out and buy any BTC, ETH or LTC just to hold and hope it increases in value. What I am doing, though, is starting to do some automated trading around cryptocurrencies. By taking advantage of the fact there is high volatility and the ability to buy partial coins, I look to make money on the movement of ETH/BTC/LTC.

Now I'm not an idiot. I know it is risky which is why I'm only putting in a small amount I know I'm comfortable losing. I also look at this as a technical challenge as well since I'm building the entire platform in Elixir. It's a win-win. If I make money then I'm happy. If I lose the little I put in I get bummed but then will have a large production Elixir application in my name that I could talk about in the future.
Why would they care about extra traffic referred to their site if they can't profit from traffic (other than with even more traffic)?
> The legal definitions of a hostile work environment is not simply based on how something makes you feel.

No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less successful because of their biology. [1]

> It is very unlikely a hostile work environment for not firing him based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.

Any employment lawyers want to chime in on this?

[1] "For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."
He is schizophrenic.

He used to run around on HN but he gets banned pretty quickly apparently. He might pop in.
It was a google doc that he posted on an internal discussion board, it wasn't a company or even team wide memo.
Documents filled with political hot buttons screw up people's emotions and they can not process such documents rationally or in a balanced fashion, many people see only what offends them or what they want to defend. It is just screwed up...
Actually the Board should make this decision for him, but looking at who the members are and who have positioned the company exactly where it sits, I don't expect any displays of leadership in this matter.
Blaming someone for reactions to their carefully written opinion piece seems the wrong way to go. The people causing the PR meltdown are to blame.
I don't understand that statement.. or why you would agree with it. The auther of the memo was attempting to present facts. Why wouldn't I completely agree with facts that are true? Especially in this case, when most cognitive scientists seem to agree upon the facts as presented? [1]

It really doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with facts... they are still reality, regardless. And I see very, very few people arguing against the facts that Damore presented in any sort of cogent manner.

Damore's only real policy suggestion was to (gasp) treat everyone as individuals, rather than as stereotypical tribal members. And I'm personally very confused as to how anyone isn't wholly in favor of that. We are all more than our skin color or gender.

[1] https://archive.is/VlNfl
Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978228
Let's take bets on how long this survives on the front page.

I'm going with 15-20 minutes from now.

Who wants the over/under?

edit: Already down from 3rd to 6th while points went from 130 to 170. 7 minutes in.

edit: now 7th
One of the books that really allowed me to think differently and sometimes overpower my train of thought is called "The Power of Now". The rhetoric can be super flowery at times (especially in the beginning), but the point he tries to get across was incredibly novel to me and there's strategies in there to help you control your brain and use it more as a tool.

I often think that salmon has it better than us humans. The salmon is focused on doing what it's doing at the moment, and doesn't have the time or capacity to build a sense of 'self' that they are proud or ashamed of, that colors their actions and gives them pain in the moment because it wasn't what they wanted or thought it would be. They just want to get up stream.
Ha! I love it. I just recently created a tool for personal use that does something similar to this.

I use Evernote notes with bullet lists as my TODO list. I created a tool that takes each line of a received email and adds it to my TODO list at the top. It is very convenient. My wife can email me things that need to get done!
That's an interesting idea. There's something very raw about those university.edu/department/~username pages that existed with the most basic of HTML--unstyled tables, blue anchor links, images only when you needed them, and almost no Yavascript.

That rawness, without too many attribute tags let alone CSS, is brutalist.
Looks like a planar phased array antenna to me.
"By doing it in an anti-science, anti-evidence way"

But they didn't. That man's argument was not science. It wasn't. There was absolutely no scientific evidence behind his argument. He misrepresented studied, and he cherry picked what he wanted. For more on that, check here: http://blog.goldieblox.com/2017/08/open-letter-james-damore-... It's an article from a female engineer who read the manifesto, and takes issue with the conclusions drawn from the studies.

The ones claiming that his manifesto was "scientifically sound" are those who are anti-science and anti-evidence.

"They could have simply said that they were taking punitive actions and kept him in the fold."

No, they couldn't. By keeping him, they would be legitimizing his views. And by doing that, they would be further alienating all of their female employees, and a lot of others, both current and future. Just about no woman would want to work there, knowing that they endorse those viewpoints.
Regardless of who is right or wrong here, I don't get what the point of that Memo was ? I mean there are other ways of voicing your opinions on controversial topics like these. If I work for a large organization and I send a memo that discusses a sensitive and controversial topic, I am really creating trouble. I am not supporting his firing on this but he could have just avoided doing this. Companies exist only for 1 reason: profit for their shareholders. That is the hard fact, whether we like it or not. If a company gets bad PR because of one employee, they will fire the employee.

Even if there was some merit in his argument, he could have chosen to do it differently. Bad choice which blew up pretty fast.
No, those that were most outraged about the leak internally and turned to public shaming outside Google's walls are the actual problem. Why has the CEO not publicly reprimanded these individuals as well? I'm sure many in the company see the leakers as heroes. This attitude sets your company up for a culture of leaking. You have to reprimand both leftist and rightist leaker and try to get the conversation back to being civil.

Furthermore, his memo canceling the town hall made things worse when he declared the majority agreed and that some wish he had done more. He didn't acknowledge any of the people internally that disagreed with the firing. He's probably not even aware that he's set himself up to only hear opinions that agree with the firing because others will be too afraid to question it.

Honestly, I want Google to have a third-party set up a truly anonymous poll of all employees and measure how people really feel instead of speculate on how many agree or disagree with the firing. This is a company with expertise in analytics after all.
One thing I do not get is why was the (original) memo written in "Google's voice" rather than stated as a personal point of view. Who, except maybe Sundar Pichai and the head of HR, has a right to talk for the company as a whole?
Sundar Pichai does seem to be a little off balance and a bit out of his depth.

That said, why should he resign? In the overall scheme of things, this isn't much of a crisis. If this were the standard to fire CEOs by not many companies would have CEOs left.
Instart is a MITM service like Cloudflare. It more or less partners with adproviders to serve thirdparty requests through a proxy on the first party domain.

Not so much a flaw.
Fetanyl was a new drug at some point. Pharmaceuticals are over prescribed, healthcare businesses are a leech on the infrastructure, American lifestyles are inherently unhealthy, and no amount of new drug patents are going to fix those problems. Your oncologist friends might have new drugs to prescribe but that doesn't change the core problem of soaring cancer rates due to lifestyle and environmental issues.
How would this have played in other countries? Is there someone from the U.K. or broader EU that could weigh in? I seem to recall that other countries have greater protections for speaking ones mind like this, which would have protected the author from termination.
Heard it all the time in Missouri growing up.
Yeah, like, there's a climate change denier in the NYT op-ed section. NYT isn't DemocracyNow - it's editorial team has range.
> Can we safely assume that people who literally march in solidarity with neo-Nazis

Are we talking about anyone who's done so here?

If not, why bring them up?
My guess is an SJW was trying to make an example of Damore, the condemnations and soap-boxing came incredibly fast, this backfired obviously.
Jay Leno ate some of a 125 year old fruitcake on his show in 2003 - http://www.cbsnews.com/news/maybe-he-shouldve-let-it-breathe...
This rose has a much tighter action-reward loop, both for consumers and producers. Yellow journalism, tabloids, etc were taking advantage of the same human tendencies, but the speed and volume of the message is orders of magnitude greater than in the past.
Caesar consensus, which is referenced in the Coco technical whitepaper, seeks to address the problem you mention.
> there preferences will be set either by nature or culture.

Culture is something that hiring practices can change.
Honoring Our Friend Bassel: The Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship
Toxic Jewellery Is Marketed to Teens
He didn't circulate one. He sent it to a mailing list which purported to be a safe place for open, honest sharing of opinions regarding diversity and hiring.
Almost all males I know are not on instagram, and I'm in my early twenties. It's not like Facebook in that you might "miss out" on things like invitations to events or participation in groups. It's just a photo sharing website. Calling it "modern society" is just ridiculous hyperbole
"Hosted" in this context implies the content is served online by another entity than your own organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting_service
This is the first fair and balanced article on this topic I've seen.

> In his memo, Damore cites a series of studies, making the case, for example, that men tend to be more interested in things and women more interested in people. (Interest is not the same as ability.)

I've been trying to hammer this point to all my colleagues (in private of course, I wouldn't dare to post it on public channel due to high probability of getting decapitated!): interests/preferences not abilities.

Every time someone says the memo is denigrating women by telling them they are unfit or incapable of working in tech it makes me want to scream! It is not about any individual's ability but about preferences of a group. It might as well be that the arguments don't support the conclusion. But I haven't seen anyone offering a reasonable rebuttal that doesn't involve name-calling and blanket statements like "the author clearly doesn't understand gender".
Or maybe you mean that too much productive capital is being wasted mining these coins? If so, maybe you're right. I'm not sure that has much to do with a crash that would affect the global economy though.