skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the people I wouldn't want to work with, and they plaster their names and beliefs all over social media for the world to see.

I'm mature enough to get past my views and work with people of different viewpoints as I've had to do all the way through college and my professional life. I was told this was the whole purpose of group exercises in high school and college but I suppose like many things, that applies to only privileged people such as I.

The difference is I actually have to practice what I learned from carrying other people's grades in college for every single day in my professional life for as long as somebody catches wind of my political alignment and threatens to quit if my company doesn't remove me. It's a team sport after all.
Getting ready for Europe’s new data protection rules
The main big problem with Gnome 3 is that if you not like the decisions that the developers take of how your desktop must be, you only can fuck yourself.

At least with KDE you have freedom to change things at your discretion.

Also, Gnome 3 more stable ?? WTF ? I saw more broken desktops and WTFs with Gnome that with KDE. Even I saw KDE working with a buggy X11 driver when Gnome simply fails on a miserable way.
The conclusions here are obvious to anyone that's been living in the US in the last decade or two. It's not that difficult to see/feel the changing weather patterns. So why does it need approval? This is science. What kind of science needs approval? If the government agencies want to dispute this, let them put forward a different hypothesis from the data. This authoritarian monopoly that various government agencies have on science has got to stop. It's not just climate change. Facts like cannabis being a safe substance, lead being dangerous, etc. are/were ignored for decades. It seems to me government funds studies and then ignores their conclusions. This is clearly not in the interest of society. At the very least it's an absolute waste of money. Will the government ever represent the people and their interests or is it just too far gone for that to the point that we're stuck with the interests of a few assholes controlling and ruining everything?
Did you read what he wrote, though? He enumerates the ways in which he favors diversity and diversity programs. He's specific about which forms he likes and which he doesn't. I think his preferences are reasonable, but others may disagree. What is not reasonable, in my view, is shaming him into silence.
25 Brisbane Startups to Watch in 2017
They are? That's news to me.

Several of the studies he cites on biological differences in genders are well accepted, so far as I know the field. But the key conclusions that he draws from those studies (and really, the entire point of the memo) don't have any direct scientific support that I know of. Perhaps I am missing some key references. Care to provide citations for some of these?

"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things ... These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics."

There's a citation for the first part. What's the evidence for the conclusion drawn?

"Neuroticism ... This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."

Citation for why neuroticism leads to fewer women in high stress jobs?

How about the entire "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap" section? That contains stuff like this:

"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things"

"Women on average are more cooperative"

"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"

Each of these statements (which at least hit my radar of being scientifically supported from the literature I know) is followed by some suggestions on how to improve the workplace for women. Implicit, of course, is that these aggregate scientific differences are somehow responsible for the gender gaps in tech. Any citations for why the quoted statements explain anything at all about gender differences in tech, rather than say, other STEM fields (biology? medicine? they have very different gender gaps).

It would be great to have the references I'm missing, because without them it sure appears the author is citing well accepted studies in order to make it look like his unsupported conclusions have "evidence".
The commenter was trying to portray her as weak or too emotional, basic logical fallacy used for centuries for weakening an argument they have already lost inside their inner souls.
There is no way that that a survey indicating that 40% of employees agree with the document is representative of Google as a whole. Google has 75k employees, nearly all of whom are aware of this incident, and a comment below suggests that the survey had <300 responses.

Indeed, a chief complaint in the manifesto is that Google is overwhelmingly liberal. Even the author of the manifesto recognized that his was a fringe position at Google.
I'm willing to bet there was a better way to do it. He probably just got impatient that he wasn't getting quick enough response, or the response he wanted, through those channels. Anyway, doing something that makes the company look so bad on such a scale as this would be grounds for firing no matter what it was about.
> Had they just (as they should ethically have done) privately let the guy know "hey uh, independent of whether we agree with you, can you please cool it because this is USA, Bay Area 2017 and you just can't say shit like that" then just waited out the controversy, this would have all been dead and gone by next week. Now it has turned into all out rage fest on both sides.

Completely agree.

I mean, alright, so the guy had a politically incorrect opinion. He isn't a raging fanatic, just allow it.
How does an NDA apply when his name is already public knowledge?
>Further evidence that Google and the other large institutions don't actually give a rat's ass about "diversity".

There is a market force pushing software companies into leftist positions (since influential demographics in the industry are strongly pro-left; also this creates positive feedback loop).

In this context Google’s behavior is rational, and this guy tried to fight it with reason and argument (I was laughing hard when I was reading the manifesto) and got steamrolled in the process, proving the argument made in his memo by personal example.
I agree a lot with the first point. Writing recursion algo using C/C++ or any other imperative language I've tried is like crawling through minefield, from one StackOverflow to another. I found that's because we've learned to write imperative programs from the entry problem to support all the cases.

I've changed my mind about recursion after I've learned to start writing the recursive algos backwards - starting from the ending condition and then moving to add support for basic recursion and adding real entry point at the end. That way instead of waiting for next segfault you try and implement each important step, one at a time. I've learned this thanks to how Erlang makes you write recursion (from "Learn you some Erlang" book).
There's no way to change the directional trend, but there are lots of things we can do to affect it's slope. Many of these things are also worth doing anyway for reasons such as energy security, resource and environmental preservation, reducing pollution, protecting biodiversity, etc. I do not believe crash course change in the global economy and our technology base is possible or desirable, were just going to have to live with and manage many of the negative consequences of climate change, but we can achieve a lot with sensible, moderate and achievable environmental policies provided they are pursued determinedly and consistently.
How on earth his opinion could "negatively impact how business is done"?
> I hope we never become colleagues.

This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. Please don't do that again.
>that's only because I don't work with this guy or folks like him

How do you know this for sure? They may not want to speak out.
I've been thinking a lot about this topic recently. I've worked in finance my whole career (20 years) and am consistently amazed by the waste, inefficiency and wealth.

Banks make money in spite of themselves.

The UK challenger banks like Monzo, Atom and Starling have taken this on as their mission - to provide a great banking experience _for people_.

My personal challenge is that I'm the sole income provider for my wife and two kids so salary/rate has always won, but maybe there's an employer out there that can both pay well and make the world a better place.

Or maybe a few of us should start one.
Unless there are other universes and there was a time before the big bang.
We've devised methods to construct a temperature record going back millennia that shows a more or less constantly fluctuating temperature. Wouldn't it be weirder for that to come to a complete standstill?
oh, I meant if you're two players. I think that's what the original post meant.
How many years until Robocop?
Have you read any of the leaked internal emails? People were quite literally threatening him. I would be pro-hostile in his place.
Here is the problem in tech.

Your have around 20% females. If any company has 30%, this means a lot of other companies will have to fight to get women there.

So they have to pay a lot more for the qualified ones or accept to get token women for the sake of PR.

The problem starts before the workplace: in homes and at school. Start educating minorities and women on the job opportunities in tech. Make them discover the joy of tinkering. It's not for everyone but as someone from a lower socio-economic world I experienced how you can not know what is available to you. That's a huge failing of the school system and especially guidance counselor who usually don't know shit about nothing.
> hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha etc.

Would you please not post like this? It ruins HN threads in more ways than one.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14955239 and marked it off-topic.
NYC Models
It's definitely not representative. For reasons that would be obvious if you knew the history of the document, but that i can't share, it consists almost entirely of a sample of people from certain mailing lists.

It's definitely not valid to draw any conclusions about google as a whole from it.
What I get from all this debacle is that Google is still failing to be the genious hivemind it wants to be.

It has its fair share of employees with huge blind spots about their own, well, privilege, while its HR people are just as prone to spasmodic, unreasonable reactions as those of any other company.

That old, discarded motto should rather have been "don't be stupid".
I don't think this is specific to the Silicon Valley. In banking you have a similar pressure applied on the employees, with mandatory trainings that feel more like some form of political re-education, and I am sure that guy would have been fired in a London or New York bank too.
What sorts of drugs treating what sorts of illness? My employer (Europe based) does work for pharmacies and they actively push customers to choose generics[1] because it's cheaper for the customer and the markup is higher (in price -> sales price = greater margin on generics even with a lower sales price than the non-generic). These are long established companies with vertical integration throughout the manufacturing and supply chain.

This is a strictly regulated industry in Europe and I don't see them getting-away-with-it if there were health issues for the patient. I'm surprised to see so many comments here agreeing with the notion that generics are of lesser effect.

[1] prescription drugs, not over the counter paracetamol.
"Democratic" has been overloaded with meanings and has become very ambiguous in that respect. That is the real problem.

My guess is that many here say "democratic" and mean "a system that will guarantee one respect as per John Rawls' veil of ignorance [0]". A parliamentary democracy with clear separation between legislative, executive and judiciary seems to be the lease bad solution humanity has been able to come up with for now.

Venezuela, Turkey and Poland are just recent highlights of how vulnerable parliamentary democracy is...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
Nice lumping everyone from a huge swath of a region into one group. I'm from the Midwest, currently living in the Midwest, do not hold anything close to these stupid views.
Hacker News, where taxation is theft backed by state violence, but systemic racism is just, like, an opinion, man.
> Basically transforming what bitcoin has become, with few mining pools/operators deciding its fate and whom users anyway have to trust - into witnesses which can be replaced.

This is a poor analogy because colluding Bitcoin miners can never steal funds; they just stamp a chain with proof of work, while the Bitcoin P2P network verifies the stamped blocks, and rejects them if they’re invalid. In the case of Byteball, colluding witnesses can steal funds, which becomes increasingly problematic as the value of the currency increases.
Gnome looks beautiful, but the workflow seems weird.
> * Google has 75k employees*

not 75k engineers right?
Simple Wikipedia for children and adults who are learning English
It's published on wordpress.com, non-peer reviewed etc.

There is a range of credible opinions on some aspect of climate change (for example, the impact of water vapor around cities on measurement). It's probably worth concentrating on the ones which have at least been peer reviewed.
I believe you. I also believe the 2nd chart would basically look the same if you polled 10,000 representative people from inside Google. The 1st one, not so much.
This seems like a really bad move to me, unless of course, there were other issues with the said employee's work. Instead of removing all proponents of a different (and most probably incorrect but let's leave that aside) ideology, they could have started workshops, lecture series, heck even one on one conversations to make him and others see why their views are damaging to the Google culture and society in general, and maybe they would see why they're wrong. That is what the Google I know would do. Alas, it seems the Google I know is no more.
This is actually a good point though.

The companies, should stay as much as to the political center, and it is wise to do so. Google, unfortunately, built its early image as a company with moral, where it nows turns into a burden rather than a legacy.
What really makes Google "bad on such a scale" is actually firing the guy and thereby confirming his "echo chamber" point.
Not too, suprising, you simply cannot have such a person at your company that is basically publicly saying women and minorities shouldn't work there.
> Can't we just give everyone a chance, instead of trying to pigeonhole them right away?

The enginner did not say women can't be engineers, merely implied that the gender imbalance in the field may not be entirely the result of society. There are very real, very definite emotional and psychological differences between men and women overall[1]. Why is it so weird to think that those differences might lead to different career paths?

>Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.

Just that the other side is crazy too doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the possible weaknesses of the left. Extreme political polarization on both sides combined with a decline in peoples' willingness to consider the opinions of those who oppose them is part of what is causing all this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
> Populism is truer to true democracy than other forms of say representative democracy.

This might be a case of you guessing what a word means or projecting meaning to it.

Populisim is form of political rhetoric, demagogy that creates division between "common man" and the "elites". Common people are "pure and innocent" and the "elites" are evil. Populism is very anti-intellectual in its nature. Populist believes in the wisdom, or virtues of the common people. The message in populism is that things are very simple and gut level reactions are right. Populist rhetoric turns democracy into mob rule.

The main difference between populism and democracy is difference between before and after.

Working democracy is not just voting to express opinion or will. It requires institutions that make democratic decision making processes possible. Democratic decisions are result of many conflicting views going trough this process.

Populists try to undercut all these processes and institutions. they claim that there is already existing united and just "will of the people" they (the populists) already know. Democracy is just way to get it done. This is why populists try to 'streamline' democratic prosesses so that they can push their agenda.
This is so subjective even a rookie like me can tell he's biased. Each desktop environment has its key ideas behind it. You can compare individual components, which would be at least subjective enough, but you have to admit that both are huge code landscapes that offer ranges of exclusives functionalities and features. So saying one is "the best" is not an option I'm afraid.
Has anyone actually read the damn manifesto? It reads like it was written by the sort of person stupid enough to openly disparage his fellow employees using cited Wikipedia articles. This entire controversy is so unbearably stupid - political polarization blew this out of proportion.
> yes everyone shoukd have the right to speak about their opinions in a non-violent or threatening way

Why? And where do you draw the line of what's non-violent or non-threatening? Because to you that line is, say, X=96 whilst the person sat next to you has it at X=45. Other desk over, Bill, with PTSD, has it at X=12. Where do -you- put the line?
I owe the United States and fellow citizens precisely what they owe me. The right to succeed or fail based on my abilities with the right to equal opportunity under the law regardless of my race religion etc.

I certainly do not owe another man's child my child's future and wealth because we have been christened 'White People' and are now responsible to atone for unfashionable property holding of 18th century English American Noblemen and be discriminated against by the state. If that is what the 'left' of America thinks this country stands for and that is how we should live then I am fairly certain they will continue on the downward trajectory into the pages of history and possibly the insane asylum.

A healthy and prosperous farewell to you my geriatric Boomer good man.
> The author is either a total idiot or he just retired with a cool 10-30MM he would be paid by Google to be fired. I'm going to guess it is the later

Um, that's one possibility I suppose. But I am reminded of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfv32dmVFw

[I work for Google, but have no insider information about this.]
>One of my former colleagues once made a "drug" where the excipient actually was therapeutically valuable while the listed API was barely better than placebo. Luckily we didn't submit it for approval.

That seems... ridiculously illegal.
3 (display switching) and 5 (dynamic workspaces) are the only actual arguments compared to any other DE, and the second is subjective. Pretty weak article.
Maybe?

Remember though, that groups that are underrepresented may also be disproportionately affected.

IE women may feel the document is much more harmful than men, but by numbers, ...

You'd have to break it down by a lot of variables, and once that happens, in practice, everyone will just draw whatever conclusion they want anyway :)

Anyway, not gonna speculate on what it would look like, just gonna point out it's not valid data.
I was making a counterpoint to the parent post. Note the links there, nothing much to do with tech. And you're completely wrong about sample sizes:

"Comparisons of oral non–gender-blind tests with written gender-blind tests for about 100,000 individuals "

"Over 2,100 public servants"

"validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty"
It would be great if you're right. But I've been watching this issue for decades. And I'm not optimistic. National US policy is worse than ever. China is starting to switch to renewables. But they're also cutting SO2 emissions, and that will increase radiative forcing.
Would you want that guy on your team? I wouldn't.
> I think you should get used to the idea that reasonable people disagree strongly with the notion that they should be open-minded about any idea. There are plenty of things I am not open-minded about:

The examples you cite are obviously extreme, and so you obviously put me in a bit of an unfair position in having to defend them, so I will start out by unequivocally stating that I do not hold this belief, nor do I advocate it or believe it in any way.

With that out of the way, saying you would never countenance holocaust denial is in many ways equivalent to the Catholic church saying it would never countenance a heliocentric universe. The science up to that point was on their side. The 'known' facts and their religious scholarship were on their side. But they were wrong. Similarly, you know the holocaust happened because you've read it happened. You weren't there. You likely don't know anyone who was there, or if you do, their memories are quite old, and modern science knows quite a bit about how fickle memory can be. It is possible the the holocaust did not happen. Unlikely in the extreme, but possible.

Now, am I going to waste my time listening to a holocaust deniers argument? No, probably not. I put an extremely low prior on the holocaust being ahistorical. So low that it's unworthy of even the most passing consideration. However, that prior is not zero, and it should never be zero. If I started hearing enough people that I respect saying, "hey, you should really listen to this holocaust denier's argument, it's kind of interesting", I might start to pay attention.

My point in defending a non-zero prior for all beliefs is simply to illustrate that you have some prior belief about what this Google engineer has said. You either have or have not read what he actually wrote. I think it likely you haven't. Because what he actually says is fairly reasonable. Certainly not in the 'holocaust denial' realm of truth-probability.

If you have the time and inclination to post here about it, then you have the time and inclination to reject his arguments directly, rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. What is the point of that sort of dismissal? It convinces no one. It changes no opinions. It adds nothing to the universe. This guy made a rational, intelligent argument in support of his case. He cited studies, he explicitly embraced the ideals of diversity, but simply disagreed with a few of the methods. If you disagree, that's fine. But have the courage to do so substantively. Maybe you'll change some people's minds, and actually further the cause you seem to be arguing for.
I used Gnome on a slower laptop the other day, and I have to say it's no longer the slow beast it was when it was first released. And in fact, I find the Gnome Shell to be pretty intuitive and easy to use.

Gnome is getting better and better all the time, I still hope for the year of the Linux Desktop, but I'm eternally optimistic.
40% of employees or 40% of memegen?
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