skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The top sentence is followed by three full paragraphs you clipped out. Only then do we reach the bottom statement you've quoted, albeit in the source is prefaced with the following:

> Now, treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do. As this is not my area of expertise, I can only offer my non-expert opinion on this issue, which is this: There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. ...
The most telling quote:

"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"

Lowering the rate of false negatives does not lower the bar. If anything, it just improves the process and yields more qualified candidates. If you increase the rate of false positives, then you would in fact lower the bar.

It's muddled thinking like this that makes me doubt his ability as an engineer, not to mention his ability as a social scientist.
I replied elsewhere but in case you didn't see it:

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, but his argument clearly suggests that less qualified 'diversity' candidates are being hired.

1. http://www.prolekare.cz/dbpic/jp_5403_f_21-x1000_1600
The author asserted that gender imbalance at google is the result of evolutionary/biological factors, and that diversity programs attempting to establish parity in representation are damaging to google and should be abandoned.

Look at this and explain to me how evolutionary psychology or biology explain what happened to women in CS in the US:

https://developers.hp.com/sites/default/files/Intl%20Womens%...

If the author's positions sound mild or plausible to you, I don't believe you've actually read the science on this issue. What the original author said simply isn't supported in the way they claim. That we can measure slight differences in aggregate between women and men in no way explains what's going on as a sole factor.
What cause would he have for suing Google? It's at will employment, and writing anything is not a protected activity.
This is the most Orwellian thing that has emerged out of all of this, that opinions are "physical" actions. Do you not realize the endstate that line of thinking? Physical reaction in response to opinions.
Leverage.

Government lawsuit against Google right now means that he has the leverage. The odds are the same people who are tasked with the programs to promote whatever the author carefully worded in his post are the people who received/sent emails/edited internal presentations that mentioned something that a good lawyer would be able to twist into a Google's managers admitting that Google does in fact systematically pays women less than men to do the same job. Google has a lot more to lose from that lawsuit than from the author of the memo.

[Edit: typos/clarity]
Yes, without employer in picture, what they did was probably deliberate. They also straight up lied to you about needing a new script. I work in the industry and familiar with some of these practices, but this is pretty low.
That doesn't say what you think it says...
I'm on an x220.
Didn't really know what I was going to do for my next computer, but there might be hope yet...
There's a balance to strike between "wanting everyone working under you to implement exactly your vision", "wanting everyone working under you to make something more amazing by throwing their own ideas in".

An important part of finding this balance is deciding exactly how much you trust your underlings to know enough about what the hell they're doing so that they don't do anything dumb, and to have a vision closely enough aligned with yours that their attempts at improving your ideas usually make you delighted. Clearly Sachs is not willing to extend much trust to people he is just now hiring to work in his studio.

Like, would you be happy with an intern fresh out of school who decided to roll their own crypto instead of interfacing to the library you told them to?
I have to err on the side of caution and say no, just as an employer can't fire someone for their religious beliefs (which are arguably just as inflaming as the viewpoints people take issue with in this thread).
> Equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes are not opposed goals, and the left hasn't abandoned the former for the latter.

They may not be opposed goals but if a method includes the exclusion of certain racial and sex groups then you can not call the method an equality of opportunity. You are simply trying to gift success to a preferential and privileged race or sex. That is the method the American liberal left has chosen. And it is racist and sexist methodology.

> The left, OTOH, recognized that the absence of the latter causes the absence of the former (outcomes at t0 define opportunities at t1; one of the most important parts of outcomes are the opportunities that they create) and so in the absence of equality of outcomes, corrective measures are necessary to create equality of opportunity, and those measures are in many cases going to involve moving toward equality of outcomes, both in direct nature and indirect effect.

Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.

In most cases including employment and other competitive activities there will always be losers. When two tennis players play a game there will be one winner and one loser. When there is a management spot open in a company there will only be one winner and multiple losers. When 1000 applicants apply for a single job opening there will be one winner that gets the job and 999 people who lose.

What the Liberal Left has embraced by promoting equality of outcomes is the removal of equality of opportunity in its entirety for anyone they have preemptively decided should be the looser. There can be no competition in the first place and there is no opportunity. Winners are simply anointed by a committee of divinely anointed deciders.

If 1000 people apply for a job and 999 of them are White and Asian men and one is Black woman and the anointed deciders decide that a Black woman should get the job, which is what race based quotas do, those 999 white and Asian men had no equality of opportunity period.

If this is the sort of game that the Liberal left thinks they are going to play with hundreds of millions of people's lives, and they think they cap pick and choose who's hopes and dreams come true, and they can exclude hundred of thousand on a whim to meet an arbitraty and ever changing percentage of racialy balanced winners, good luck. The small window of accaptence of these sort of ideas are closing with the Baby Boomers. The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good. And they have every right to reject them. These are massive iniquality that the left thinks they are entitled to try and engineer into a very fragile and tenuous democracy.

In conclusion promoting the equality of outcomes is erasing the possibility of equality of opportunity. And in the specific case of hiring decisions using race as a criteria for deciding who wins the job it's simply an act of blatent discrimination by the specific employer and the management who made the decisions.
Respectfully, I'm still not sure my point is coming across.

I agree with you; and I think everyone else does, that they'd rather work for a company that was able to see their skills.

But, what if you knew there was bias that would keep them from seeing your skills, and would keep you from being hired because of it? What if your only choices were to be hired through a diversity program, or not be hired at all?
How is it possible to claim that tolerance is not a notion that morality addresses? Is morality not a standard of conduct that all should abide by? Or once again is it simply a notion that is brandished like a beacon simply when it is convenient and then snuffed out like a mere candle when it no longer suits the individual and has long outlived its usefulness?
Rather, it shows that having people from diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences works more effectively than a social 'monoculture'.
Totally agree! Especially as a PhD student in genetics.

Just wanted to put out the point that race as we understand it does not map cleanly onto distinct phenotypes.
> I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
> I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.
> You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most
> likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female.

And then later on:

> By creating special awards for women I think you’re belittling the impact
> and effort a group of humans are having in their field – just because of
> their gender.

She is certainly insulted by these so called 'outreach' programs. She is using the word 'victimising' and 'belittling' to describe them. It can't get any clearer than this.

We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.

The ensuing comments thread on HN also had many similar stories.
Sounds like your "friend" emotionally abused you into thinking you are a bad person. How else would someone think it's ok to be discriminated against?
I agree.

However, I sympathize with younger people because it's a double-edged sword at places like Google, where your work and your life are very intentionally blurred. You eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. You go out and socialize with your friends from work. You do laundry at work (I'm not sure if Google still does this or not). It's not like the 1980s where people check in at 9am and leave at 5pm.
The employees at Google are overwhelmingly white and male. According to this article Google employee makeup is as follows;
-70% male/30% female
-61% white / 30% Asian, 4% identifying as two or more races, 3% Hispanic, 2% black, and 1% other

The tech industry is heavily male and majority Anglo (aka white), with a large Asian representation. I presume that if you are on on hacker news you work in the tech industry or work at a startup of some sort.

I would prefer to not sweep your comment under the table. Its conceivable that there might be something that as a white male you are could be 'persecuted' by someone at your place of employment. However you are going to have to provide some real evidence how you are being victimized when the numbers are so tilted in your favor. And if this is true it is most likely one person, perhaps a superior? Gather some evidence in form of emails, documentation, etc. I'm not sure what kind of persecution you are the victim of but your first steps might be to discuss things with your immediate supervisor, or if that person is the source of your persecution then talk to HR or your bosses boss.

If you feel like moving to another team or a project might help look for internal postings at the company, talk to other people in other teams to see if you would be a good fit. A lateral move within the company might make a big difference.

One thing I would NOT do is write a letter about how women are prone acting neurotic, and complain about general efforts to get more women and minority members involved at your company. I would also advocate against complaining about being a minority based on your political beliefs, that the entire company you work for makes you feel ostracized because your political beliefs don't align with what your employers. That's probably a bad idea.
QNial7: The NIAL language environment
Yeah, when it comes to really expensive stuff they'll know the minimum, because then they have their own incentives to make sure you can pay, and will be in a financial position to be able to do the post-procedure upkeep. This is especially true when it's stuff with scarce resources like transplants. It's gonna cost a fuckload, you'll have a lot of recurring costs, and they're going to evaluate if you'll be set up for success or not because otherwise there are other people who could use the organs.
Isn't the other option serving errors to all clients? What are the options for

* currently serving 1k clients
* can serve 10k more
* see a spike in 50k clients

I'd rather serve 11k clients and tell 39k of them to try again later (with enough capacity to tell them to try again).
ZFS won’t save you: fancy filesystem fanatics need to get a clue about bit rot
I think Julian Assange might be onto something here: https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/894203366074707968

He goes on about how things turned out in Malaysia (from more or less unified country to one divided along racial lines due to overblown identity politics). He concludes that one way to combat that is to remove the first-past-the-goalpost-wins political system in the US. Although in his example LKY combats it via authoritarianism. I don't think we want to go down that route.
This is an amazing discussion and it really needs to occur. What scares me is how much this conversation is being ruled by an angry emotive mob, at the expense of democracy and free speech. There is almost no fact in any of these comments.

Why MUST we have 50% of male and female in any industry? Have you noticed how almost every media outlet ignores female dominated industries (such as veterinary science) [0], where over 85% of vets in the western world are female? The strongest argument in this thread appears to be that there must be equal numbers for equality, but it's only EVER applied to male dominated industries (Google it if you doubt me). However, not only is this argument unjustified, it's continually selectively applied by most mainstream media outlets, again and again. There is no challenge or balance to any of these arguments from the mainstream media.

I am disappointed that Google sacked this engineer. To understand this mindset, you really need to watch this video on Yale. People being shut down from talking because they're male or white [1] or because angry mobs don't like what they have to say. People in this thread talk about sexism and yet they struggle to provide any evidence (while I can point at truck loads of evidence of misandry, eg. domestic violence, veterinary science, etc). This Yale video talks about this exact problem i'm describing. We have a society where you are no longer allowed to express selective views (even with evidence). Google have confirmed this with their dismissal of this engineer. What we've become concerns me deeply.

To all of the people who have stood up for free speech (and you're in the clear minority in this thread), I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you want to be able to sort out the media that's worth listening to, watch reporting on this topic closely over the next few days. Look for extreme prejudice and emotive language from the media. To quote an excellent quote from the Yale video, "these are moves of power, not reason" (3 minutes in, [1]).

So where are the rational arguments? What about the percentage of female university graduates with relevant skills? What about Dr Simon Baran Cohen's findings on very young children and trends to their thinking patterns? Where are the facts? Why are most people side-stepping facts?

Now please re-read this entire thread and ask yourself about freedom of speech. Ask yourself about democracy. Ask yourself about how many people have presented facts. There is something seriously wrong. You should be deeply concerned about the lack of debate, the lack of evidence, the number of emotive arguments and the message Google has sent to anyone who doesn't toe the politically correct line.

[0] http://career-advice.careerone.com.au/career-development/pro...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM
Conservatives are just as likely to de-friend, who doesn't want to live in their own bubble? More to the point, the conservative subreddit on reddit is indistinguishable from the Pyongyang subreddit in its quick-to ban if not ideologically on-point policy.
I swear I read exactly that in a job posting for diversity director...
Why more people in California aren’t selling their homes
> Are you saying there are no situations in which applying a systematic adjustment as a function of gender to interview scores could result in a predictable net-fitness-increase in the resulting skill distribution of hired people?

Yes if you don't try to match the distribution of the pool of candidates. if the pool of candidates ratio is 10/90 and your goal in the company is 10/90, I am ok with anything that helps you to get close to the 10/90. (When both distributions are normal gaussian with similar mean and average. I don't see basketball teams hiring short people to fit the ratio or the pool of candidates)

> 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?

I prefer being hired because they saw my skills. I think is better in the long term. If I am qualified for a job I will find it, it could take me more time but at some point I will find it and I will be happier than in a job where they saw me hired by a diversity program. Of course if I need the job to survive wouldn't care, but I think this is not the common case (or I might be wrong but as I said in another comment this is my personal opinion, other will think differently)
Does anyone know why isn't this story higher in the news feed? For the past two hours it has had over 500 upvotes and over 600 comments and it's still at position nine.
Enjoying those fees?
well, i understand the frustration, but what are the alternatives? i don't think there is anything Segment could've done otherwise. because, should Segment be publicly addressing to everyone of all their internal projects?
how would we know which projects weren't already in development?

and if expecting some NDA for an 'open source' project, that is just wishful thinking.

btw, i too have submitted my app to them, knowing full well in advance that they would have every power to just take my ideas to do what they want to do with it. i did get a response email from them i think roughly 6 weeks ago, so that is something.

but i'll say this. the idea and vision of the fellowship was grand and bold (something i wish more companies would do) but it was a bit disappointing to see it beeing poorly executed at the end.
Spelunky creator finally returns with a new game–er, 50 of them
The problem in cases of "social outrage" is that the outrage is, itself, expression.

The same protections that you demand exist for people expressing their right has to fall on both sides of a debate.

You can't draw a neat box around one person's thought and say "protect this from others".
That source states that the limitation is defined as being by a public (ie. government) body.

>The nature of the public body is irrelevant. It could be legislative, executive or judicial, or a publicly owned enterprise
Retaliation for <pick whatever argument his lawyers can make>. Remember, unless it this is dismissed with a summary judgement Google is going to have to deal with a discovery. Discovery with the other side knowing about internals of the company is a risk no company wants to take.
> I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1); if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.
> Rich, poor, farmers, ranchers, middle class; all kinds have property in forests.

And none of them should.
Like I keep saying in this thread--you've misunderstood the point of diversity and have gone down the wrong rabbit hole. You can acknowledge and celebrate everyone's differences. You just need to realise that those differences don't make a solitary bit of difference in their capacity to perform a job.
Or use a single socket for both protocols (set the IPV6_V6ONLY socket option to false).
Correct, because bias is prevalent and almost impossible to avoid.

For example: does any part of your interview involve a subjective evaluation? If so, do any of the evaluators know the candidates' names? If so, congratulations, your process is probably biased! http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...

That's literally all it takes: some human judgment and some way to guess at the applicant's race. The discrimination can happen subconsciously. You and I would probably fall victim to it despite our best intentions.

Since the manifesto we're discussing is mostly about gender, it's worth mentioning that the same thing happens there: http://m.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

Nobody knows how to screen job applicants for pure merit without bias. If it's a choice between "our process is imperfect just like everybody else's" and "we stumbled upon the perfect unbiased screening process and all bias in the output is due to inherent variation in the population," bet on the first one every time. It's about a million times more likely.
Without knowing the distribution of the applicants, we can't say. Maybe 0.1% of all applicants are black, we don't know. In the same way, just saying 1% of tech roles are filled by black engineers doesn't imply that google's hiring practices are discriminatory.
Logged in users should take priority, depending on the number of page requests, all users will see an error at some point breaking the site for everyone.
How far do you take it? For example, here is an article suggesting that female doctors are better than male doctors: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/female-do...

Should a female doctor avoid mentioning this article to a male colleague to avoid getting fired?
Building on your car analogy, many auto repairs are common enough that their prices can be listed on the menu. Oil changes, tune-ups, tires, brakes, etc. Known quantities and easy to price. I'm sure the same is true for many non-emergency medical procedures. I don't understand why a doctor can't tell me how much it costs to put a broken arm in a cast, clean out earwax, or treat a rattlesnake bite. Well, actually, I do understand--there is a gravy train of money that comes out of hiding the expense of a service from customers until after the service is rendered.
I strongly feel this was a PR move by Google. I read the article and although I disagree with many of the points stated, firing the person was an extreme step. It would set a wrong precedent for anyone trying to speak up against the majority. A behind the door warning and a rap on wrist would have been enough.
Arguing the biological factors make a meaningful difference in engineering feels like arguing for vim or emacs makes for a better engineer, or Windows vs. Mac users, or Chrome vs Firefox. Even if you use a computer differently just considering how broad the field of engineering is, I cannot imagine a case where biological factors are a more likely predictor of success than plain old institutional bias.
> Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal

You have unwittingly provided an example of the "unconscious bias" against women that Google's programs seek to unpack and correct.

The term "virtue signal" implies that one's reaction is motivated by a desire to make an impression on others, a superficial and calculated response. But to a woman, reading an essay full of gender stereotypes can create a real sense of pain and outrage. So when you're saying "virtue signal", you're really mostly talking about men.
This is word for word exactly how I feel. I knew it was going to happen, but part of me was hoping that Google was better than that. It is not.