skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article:
>> Companies that market directly to
>> A.I. software, rather than to humans,
>> might gain a competitive advantage."

I don't know why, but this is really disturbing.

"Hey Siri, find me a widget"

"I've found three locations with widget in your area. Would you like me t... WHOA! Check out the bytes on that ad!"
AFAIU, but I cannot reference, this was sent to a limited group of people, got forwarded and then became viral.
The article claims, and as a (former) lawyer this seems plausible, that in California this would be illegal as it pertains to employees.

But you're right that executives are often treated differently, and board members even more so (since they're not just management - they're not employees at all). But I believe that under federal law political views are not currently a protected status, so it would not necessarily be illegal to fire someone for their political beliefs. Though this might seem odd, it is perhaps a behavior that is sufficiently deterred by the fact that it would be very bad for business in many cases. Remaining employees could be upset by it, customers and potential customers could be alienated, and legal challenges could be mounted under various theories.

Another reason that this could be less common that might expect, given that it's legal under federal law, is that some states are not at-will employment states (like California is), so it's generally harder to fire employees in general.
Women are forced to take STEM? What the fuck kind of statement is that?

The number of Iranians in Iran vastly outnumber the ones studying outside of Iran. Especially in undergrad.

Please give me sources that Iranian women are forced to study STEM.

My source is I've lived in Iran nearly most of my life.
So I gather. Not gonna lie, I heard "manifesto" and immediately thought back to Industrial Society and its Future, which is a much more substantial document; I would not have time for something of similar heft just now. I should've taken a closer look straight away. But as I said before, it's been a busy week.

Having now read it, I can immediately conclude that James Damore is very new at this, approached it under the assumption that the social and political context around the matter was susceptible to mere reasoned discourse, and really had no idea of the minefield into which he so blithely strolled.

Someone a bit more seasoned, for example, would not have included the "Possible non-bias causes..." section at all. On the one hand, it's not as well supported as it might be and "evolutionary psychology" in particular is a great big pile of unfalsifiable hypotheses. On the other and much larger hand, that section is just chock-full of material for the kind of tendentious, misrepresentative quote-mining that's a go-to tactic for those who so believe in the righteousness of themselves and their cause that they find no dishonesty too mean to deploy against someone with the temerity to dissent.

I can also immediately conclude that I did indeed perpetuate a misrepresentation from a secondary source, and I greatly appreciate 'abnry and 'beaconstudios bringing my attention to the error. In future I'll try not to make the same mistake again.
Some people are trying to hold a conversation here.

Sometimes some relevant points emerge from both sides in between the shouting and flagging.

If you don’t think there is a conversation here I guess you are free to leave unless you are a mod.
I'd gladly pay for movies. I'd much rather it actually. But until these companies get their shit together and stop hoarding content, I'm pirating it all. I'm not paying monthly subscriptions to 15 different media companies. Screw you guys.
Uncle Mining, an Ethereum Consensus Protocol Flaw
Because it led too mass-hysteria and a crap load of negative press from both liberals and conservatives. Why would you want to have someone who would sink the company to get someone that they don't agree with fired as an employee?
It's funny, back in the Delphi days, we had a famous interview question, "What's the difference between a procedure and a function?" If you couldn't answer that in 5 or so words, we knew you weren't to be hired. You'd be amazed at how many people couldn't. One guy went on for 20 minutes trying to BS an answer.
it's more than just postnatal care - better treatments, better diets, more public health knowledge etc. make a huge difference
I have always thought (guessed, really) that it is because Eastern Europe (and, more recently, many parts of Asia) recognize something that the West sometimes forgets, even though that is where you will find the strongest evidence for it: technical competence can lead to radically better lives.
I read on another HN thread that the top 25% pays 90% of taxes. Made me grok why governments will never really care about the poor pretty clearly.

It's harsh, but for cities or even countries the bottom xx% is a net drain.
No, Google Should Not Have Fired the 'Anti-Diversity' Engineer
I'm not commenting on this specific case, but if you've spent any amount of time in NameABigCorp lately, you've surely realized that various points of left-wing politics are pursued as official points of dogma. So it's not as if politics are being kept out of work in the first place.

I'm all for keeping politics out of the workplace, except for verbal conversations between colleagues. But that's just not the case right now.
I interpreted it as ten percent.
Weaponized outrage online has become a real problem, no matter your leanings. Or I prefer to call it the "Outrage of the Day" or even the daily "Two Minutes Hate" since people only seem to be outraged at that issue for about a day before finding some new shiny thing to be outraged about.

But it can really screw up people's lives in that short period of time, and scares everyone into not sharing any potentially controversial views in public nowadays, which I find disconcerting living in a country that's supposed to hold Freedom of Speech as one of its highest values (yes, I know freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, but the consequences have gotten extremely severe, career ending in a lot of cases, for statements that are sometimes taken out of context).

I'd rather people see these statements they dislike as an opportunity to engage in discourse and try to change these people's minds, instead of swift retribution, often without examination of how guilty the people in question actually are, just being told they're guilty by some random person they like on the internet is often enough to get them to jump on board.

It's especially concerning considering a lot of these people turning their shame button up to 11 consider themselves to be religious people, and most religions tend to espouse not letting yourself get swept up in hatred and casting stones at others. I'm not particularly religious, but I still don't think it's a healthy mentality to have, and I've had to ignore and heavily filter my social media in order to not see this presented to me every day, and even then I still get a lot of it shoved in my face (I can only imagine what all a person who actively looks for these things must see).

The Two Minutes Hate seems more and more appropriate the more I reflect on it. Here's a quote about it from 1984:

"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."
>If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

That's not the main argument and I think you should re-read the "manifesto" if that's what you walked away with.
No, Swift requires "any as? Cast" which returns "Optional<Cast>" (or you can use "any as! Cast" which at least crashes instead of happily proceeding with the wrong type).
You realize that {people who voted} is no where near an independent random sample and has far less power than its size suggests?
It's working for me!
You’re more likely to have a prenup than your parents were
If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down.

Talking about the work/life balance benefits of remote work is a bad thing? This makes even less sense since remote work is usually coupled with flexible work hours.
This article is trash. Who is claiming that there are no gender differences across the population? Who is she arguing against exactly?

Maybe the author should have actually read the manifesto more carefully, because it is primarily an argument about Google's hiring practices and how to build the best workforce for a company, a topic which the scientific studies she cites do not address in the slightest.
Human brains simply aren't very good at thinking statistically. You can say something totally factual and benign, like, "Most nurses are women" and someone will immediately chime in, "My uncle is a nurse!" It happens every time. It's practically a law.

We're good at noticing patterns and exceptions to those patterns, but, for whatever reason, we're just not good at distinguishing statements about populations from statements about individuals. For most people, breaking this intuition takes a lot of education and training.

So, yeah, you shouldn't really be surprised when some random person on Twitter fails to grasp the argument. It's disappointing, but it shouldn't be surprising.
On the one hand, I remember my high school math teacher complaining about how colleges even had to offer remedial education (she considered it proof that high schools were generally failing to do their jobs).

On the other hand, I personally didn't go straight from high school to college, so I was given a particular placement exam, and when I passed it I was put in college algebra (instead of being allowed to take the next harder placement exam). It was clear to me after about a week that I remembered more math than the school thought I had. Of course, I should have tested out of the class and used the free time to take something that would have been more useful to me.

I wish the school had been less rigid about which math class they would allow me to take. But the obvious outcome with this policy change will be that students will have to decide which class to take, and some will get it wrong. Will they be allowed to fail? Will that help double the graduation rate? Will more classes simply include remedial material? If so, is that an improvement?
At least in the US, this is going to require a shift in both the workplace and the home.

My father is 65, my mother in law is 59, and my father in law is late 50s (my mother passed away recently at 59). All three of them must still work full time because they can't afford to retire, preventing them from helping with our 1 year old (causing us to have a limited support system, which I supplement with a part time nanny).

But heh, GDP!
> Sexism is a prejudice based on lack of evidence and reasoning.

That's not a definition I have seen anywhere.

The usual definition is that it's "prejudice, sterotyping or discrimination based on someones gender".

If we have different definitions of sexism to begin with, of course we aren't going to agree on whether X is sexist.

So if I don't use the controversial S word: I thought his post was stereotyping and coming out against anti discrimination efforts.

> So to be clear, racism and sexism are terms used to describe prejudices, lies and falsehoods about a gender or race.

Same again: something being true doesn't make it not racist (or sexist). The falsehood/lying isn't a necessary condition.
It depends on how much the framework costs. I spent 3 years of my career using Sencha ExtJs[0], a framework you could use commercially by paying a license. I was in India back then, and could not afford the license to use it for personal projects I hoped to turn into a side business. By the time I came to the US, they changed their pricing model so that you now needed to buy a 5-pack license to be able to use it.

There is a lot to like (and a little to dislike) about the Sencha family of frameworks, but the licensing alone made me look at alternatives inspite of being familiar with it.

[0]: https://www.sencha.com/
From my earliest days programming, 1975, through to the early 1990s differences of opinion were common in offices. The first gulf war, for example, was a hot topic.

For 15 years I was off running my own small software business and consulting after that.

When I returned to an office in 2005 I was surprised to find that all political/social discussions had vanished.

Now the silence has been replaced with intolerance. I don't know why that happened, but I do know it could signal the beginning of the end of the America I grew up in. When peaceful disagreement is disallowed disagreements will eventually be expressed in less than peaceful ways.
Uber, Lyft Mangle Rental Cars and Taxis. Other Sectors Next
> just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

You are the only one being "prescriptive". If a class of people doesn't prefer (in aggregate) to do the kinds of work you want them to do, what right do you have to insist that it is better for them if they are forced to do this work? When did it become feminist to lecture women about the sort of work environment they should want?

You write as if you know what is best for society, yet where do you get this knowledge? It seems to me you do not even understand the points you are criticizing. The author of the Google piece was arguing that Google should change its work environment if it is serious about changing its workforce composition. He didn't tell women what they should want or how they should behave -- you are the only one doing that.
Life expectancy is a terrible measure for quality of health care. The best health care in the world won't change how much overeating and a sedentary lifestyle contribute to heart disease (the #1 cause of death in the US), stroke (#5), and diabetes (#7).

Life expectancy can vary dramatically by county, even when there are no differences at all in health care policy. [1]

That's not to say we aren't paying too much and getting too little. We are. It's just life expectancy isn't the way to measure it.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-lives-longer-s...
Playing action video games may be bad for your brain – loss of grey matter
Generalizations can be useful and many arguments won't go far without them.

As for this specific generalization: I think we wouldn't have this argument if it wasn't legitimate. The political left increasingly consists of hypocrites who advertise free speech and liberalism, but act like fascists.
Another four years of baby sitting please!
Modern Fertility – It's Time to Modernize Fertility
Thats an odd way to phrase it considering v1 was released 15 years ago. Like saying I've spent almost half of the last 10 years with my 4 years old son.
Except he said multiple times in it that any genetic differences are population level trends that do not apply to individuals.
I've wondered this also.

The question occurred to me when I heard about the epidemiology of Ebola in pre-Spanish South America. Supposedly (haven't verified) the disease incubated in wild animals, and occasionally crossed over into human populations. What limited an epidemic was that travel was slow and rare enough that the disease would spread and debilitate a single settlement before anyone could transfer it too far. (Obviously late-stage patients don't do a lot of traveling.)

So the question becomes why this hasn't changed with increased access to travel. Quarantine measures and sensible behavior appear to be the answer for inadvertent spread, but what's stopped malicious transfer? Is it just too hard to find and contract before quarantine goes into place? Is it tactically or psychologically unappealing for the groups willing to use other suicide tactics?
I have a question to further this debate.

Would people consider it sexist to administer a completely automated test of technical and personality questions which was used by an unbiased program to hire only the best qualified candidates?

What would you say if the results were essentially the same as the status quo?

By the Article's Author's account, she believes that we would probably maintain the status quo with such a test, because she thinks people are self-selecting out of STEM. Others seem to think that there is some other barrier to entering -- would a test like this fix the issue, or is there something else going on?
Well, not the OP, but for me, I clicked a link hoping to see some discussion about Javascript, and the first thread from the top is arguing about whether Number Separators of the World is a sensible topic of discussion. I mean, part of what I enjoy about HN is entertaining digression, but this may as well be an argument about varying aftermarket car part quality, as far as relevance is concerned.

And yes, I am adding to the noise; far too late now. How do you feel about car part quality?
No, iTunes on Windows was at least as shit as it was on OS X, both in terms of awful UI and the sheer bloat of it and all the extra crap it installed.
The half that didn't vote, voted to let the other side decide.
> If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down.

I've worked from home, successfully, for many years, and I disagree with that criteria. Everyone works from home differently, and I know people who can rock their work exactly because of the added flexibility to care for their home and family on their work breaks. It decreases the stress in their life to slice their day in different ways, and allows people with busy lives to do better on all fronts.

There are many different ways to manage remote teams - some are hands-off, only concerned about whether the work is done. Some monitor their people to be sure they are 100% online during "working hours". Many are in a middle ground, with expectations set of specific response times to Slack, IMs, emails, etc. Likewise, there are many different remote working styles. Some people do well with a typical 8 hour day. I tended to target a 40 hour week, but that would be made of many 2-3 hour chunks throughout the week, not 8 hour blocks.

At the end of the day, you have to trust your team to do their work. The companies that are resistant to their remote people handling personal tasks during their "working day" don't truly have that trust.
Sites with stupid Javascript isn't half the problem that mobile is. I still can't make in-app purchases on my iPhone because every time I try, Apple makes me put in my security question answers, which are random strings just like the passwords are, and then I get "your request has timed out."

Really I should be thanking Apple though for helping me save money.
One of the ironic things about this is the right has fought for years to empower corporations, and disempower workers, then goes apoplectic when Google Inc sees him as a liability and disposes of him like a used tissue. Damore sees the left as the problem, then files an NLRB complaint to try to protect himself. The biologically IQ-superior Damore might be surprised to find that the worker protections of the NLRB have been systematically hollowed out over the preceding decades by his conservative pals.

Conservatives and Republicans fought decades to enshrine the power of corporations and the 1%, and to undermine any worker autonomy. I have to roll my eyes at all this. I guess Damore found out the hard way that he's not part of the biologically IQ superior clique he thought he was part of.
In fact, there's at least as much text in the memo devoted to ideas about how to help women in tech, as there is about differences between the sexes.
Cb has responded - https://www.carbonblack.com/2017/08/09/directdefense-incorre...
Beautiful summation. The pretzel logic these folks are engaging in is quite hilarious. I don't know if the term's been widely used but I call them Gender Deniers.
>And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science

This. It's far too common here at HN.
>for people guilty of expressing a viewpoint
How about this scenario?

Writes a manifesto
1. Google is intolerant of opposing views
2. Hitler did nothing wrong.

Gets fired.

THIS PROVES MY POINT ABOUT GOOGLE BEING INTOLERANT.
Suspected Sextortionist Hiding Behind Tor Is Outed by Booby-Trapped Video
Top Security Firm May Be Leaking 'Terabytes' of Confidential Data
The manifesto didn't stop at citing statistics.
I stated Disney owns a lot of things. If that all goes behind some streaming service my kids would love to have it.

If they get it will be entirely up to the parents.

But if you're keen to know their chances; We don't even have Netflix. :)
Don't compare JS (or any language) to any other language - or any language to another language. People wrote a lot about it (Your language sucks because... - type things). JS is just another language.

The JS ecosystem is wild and moving way too fast, but even that is not really the trouble with it: it's that it's being overused.

He mentions DHTML at the beginning, which was the perfect example of using too much of something: mouse trailing bouncy balls with falling snow, my, I don't really miss those days.

Yet we're here in 2017 and React & Co. is crippling the web. Plain simple news or a blog site rendering with JS? AMP, loading megabytes of Javascript, claiming to speed up the web? When your product is text, how about you serve text and maybe only boost it or do analytics with JS? I know it's not fancy, but for a lot of sites out there, JS based rendering is completely unneeded.

In case of web apps... A little while ago I listened to a talk of front end colleagues, claiming that we'll speed up the site by async calling some blocks, so the initial content will get down fast and the less important ones will follow. When I asked if we're measuring the very end render time - the one that heats the CPUs, because you offload the rendering to the client, which can get quite stressful - the answer was 'no', mostly because nobody knows how to do it. I also asked about how screenreaders will work with this, and they thought I'm talking about mobile, which is extremely sad, and no, I'm unaware of any screenreader-friendly JS based app. (Screenreaders are the programs literally reading out the text for visually impaired.)

Google and FB offers fallback, HTML-only solutions to their services, because the realised their things don't work on slow connections and/or slow devices. Maybe this should be taken as a sign.
If this isn't a conversation, what is it?
Somebody needs to pay for the next Uber of Avocado Delivery
https://diversitymemo.com/
This is an interesting video to listen to, but as you said, the interviewer is most definitely leaning a certain direction.

That being said, I am not informed enough on the topic of gender differences to actually weigh in on who is right or wrong in this situation.
The state doesn't censor speech. Hate speech laws (in the US, anyway) aren't very strong, for example the Supreme Court in the USA didn't rule against the Westboro Baptist Church or even people burning crosses on black family's property.

(All these people whining about "facts" being censored and none of them are using facts of their own..)
Don't sites also salt (and pepper?) passwords though? Does this still apply in the scenario that they have done so?

Edit: Realised Google exists, currently reading https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16891729/best-practices-...