skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you consider the opposite questions with your male colleagues?

Bias is real. The exact same resume is, on average, considered more qualified if there's a typically male name at the top versus a female name. Did you ever wonder how many of your male colleagues unfairly benefitted from that sort of thing?
Thanks a ton
Just like on the right there are authoritarian (fascist) and libertarian (Libertarian) beliefs, the left also has authoritarian (Leninist) and libertarian (Anarchist) beliefs. And of course anywhere inbetween. Have you taken the political compass yet?
There was the time that Keith Henson tried to explain the local loopback address to Scientology lawyers during a deposition...

http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=6289

Henson: (patiently) It's at 127.0.0.1. This is a loop back
address. This is a troll.

Lieberman: what's a troll?

Henson: it comes from the fishing where you troll a
bait along in the water and a fish will jump and bite the thing,
and the idea of it is that the internet is a very humorous place
and it's especially good to troll people who don't have any sense
of humor at all, and this is a troll because an ftp site of 127.0.0.1
doesn't go anywhere. It loops right back around into your own
machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson
There is middle ground here when you control combustible material around property and let the larger parts of the bush/forest do their thing in a fire.

Here is an example of this ongoing process/advise in Australia: https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/fire-information/hazard-reduction...
When we talk about free market economics, we're not talking about the bartering system of ancient societies, even though technically the term applies. Don't do the same thing with social justice. The term has come to be known colloquially as the very recent movement that is rooted in the works of critical theory. While critical theory has been around for a while, this is new because it's become inculcated into a popular culture.
Even at the end the Japanese government believed by arming the entire population, and turning woman and children and the aged into suicide bombers, that they could inflict such heavy casualties on the allied invasion force that the US would agree to a peace treaty keeping Japan in control of the peoples they had conquered and enslaved.

The US only had two bombs. They weren't even sure they'd work. It might take months to make and deliver more. Thousands were dying every day on both sides. The US leaders decided a demonstration was too risky, what if it failed?

They had already firebombed most of Tokyo and killed more Japanese in one night than the nuclear bombs would kill. And still the Japanese leaders were still determined to use their people as cannon fodder to try to force massive casualties on the invasion force. They probably would have shrugged off the demonstration bombs, especially when no others were dropped after the 2nd for another month.

Meanwhile, tick, tick, thousands more would die every day while the US dawdled. And then they'd have to use the next ones on Japanese cities, so the delay just kills more.
Actually, fwiw, the company was founded under the principle "do no evil", but they already walked that back before this incident.
How a Pro-Trump Twitter Scheme Fell Apart After a Retweet from the President
First off, this isn't a pharmaceutical trial this is a hiring process. Second, even if there is a fundamental principle of probability that assures this is the case it's still possible to have a change that vastly reduces to false-negative rate as compared to the increase false positive rate - so much to the extent that the latter is negligible.

On a broader note, the way you're injecting a completely different message into the author's text is exactly the kind of behavior that makes these discussions toxic. I realize that might sound accusatory, but if people can't make a statement without people stuffing contradictory or unrelated words into their mouths there's no possibility of civil discussion.
Just for people who might come along later:

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

In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.

1. http://www.prolekare.cz/dbpic/jp_5403_f_21-x1000_1600
My coworker is a 24-year old white male who was very concerned he wasn't going to get a promotion simply because he was a white male. To be honest, I thought there was a good chance that he wasn't going to either. I'm so glad I'm not a young kid growing up in this age, and that I'm financially secure, and looking to retire in the next 10 years. (He did get the promotion btw, which he definitely deserved.)
Perhaps it's the same as with medical services?

Note that providers won't typically tell you the cost of a procedure unless you give them your insurance.

Don't insurers have negotiated (lower) rates with providers?
Also there's typically a relatively large deductible.

I'm guessing that between the negotiated price and the deductible and the non-sense of the insurer choosing something against common sense there's actually money to be made off the patient.

So if you're charged $1000 for an MRI and have to co-pay 200 and the negotiated cost is $200 you actually end up paying 100% of the actual cost. You can redo the math with whatever number, but the point is the percentage you think you're insured for is not real.

If insurer asks you to buy a 10x more expensive drug while they have a much smaller negotiated price, they may end up paying less or actually making money.
this is almost certainly the reason.

he'd have been better off if he said

> "we should expect to see people with certain characteristics in tech, in the same way we see people with certain characteristics in race-car driving. that's no reason to discriminate positively or negatively against race car driver candidates."

I think he did make a point similar to that. Unfortunately he stirred the hornets nest (most, I think) by pointing to the gender-wage relationship.
You really don't though. You have a right not to be harassed but you don't have an inherent right not to be outraged based on whatever cockamamie standards you choose that morning.

I'm personally outraged by people who think it's okay to write emails and chat messages with improper punctuation and spelling mistakes. Mixed case sentences, emojis, and made up capitalized abbreviations make my blood boil. But none of that is grounds for me getting those people terminated.

If I don't want to deal them I can go work somewhere else. That's the right I have. Not the right to silence them.

It's the same if they decide to express their political opinions or sports affiliations.
That is a great counter example. I expect there to be a slow migration to platforms like [this formally verified microkernel](https://sel4.systems/). This will take time and a tremendous amount of effort. But will ultimately address the counter example. In the conclusion of this migration, this puts the SE field into line with the rest of engineering.

Choosing the constraints for a project is no different in the context of CS than the context of any other fields -- electrical, mechanical, etc. It is a conversation, as you stated. This helps in many ways: it helps the developer understand exactly what the client wants, helps the client understand exactly what they are going to get, and helps build an implicit timeline replete with discrete and obvious deliverables and (if done correctly) those deliverables are fairly modular.

Thanks! I, too, get frustrated that people just say 'math! math! math!' That isn't helpful or meaningful. This is a conclusion I came to after talking to quite a few of my friends and colleagues in different engineering disciplines.
You really should read a good history of the war. You don't understand how many people were still dying every day because of it, and how many more would die due to delays. You don't understand how committed Japanese military leadership was to fight to the end. You don't even understand that the Nuclear bombs weren't even the most deadly or inhumane bombings Japan endured.
The "actual facts" of what he said are not uncontroversial. They aren't even facts. Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender" has an extensive bibliography of studies disputing the statements he claims are facts.
I think that if you have skills you will find something. if you don't have them then it might be more difficult than for men. Why do you think women cannot find ANY job in tech because of the systematic discrimination? I don't think everybody in the world is like that (maybe few as for everything in life)
Why Marketing Is So Hard for First-Time Entrepreneurs
The colloquial meaning you refer to is stupid. It's mostly used as a slur on the internet.
The data is incredibly easy to find and has been demonstrated for decades. It's an easy experiment: two identical candidates, one of them with an ethnic name (or actor) and one of them is white. It also consistently shows that white candidates do better than black candidates, despite having identical resumes.

This has been shown across society, including applications for housing, police stops, punishments in school, etc. I don't know why employment would be the one exception.
The problem with a), is that often women aren't allowed to compete on merit, or they have to perform twice as hard, twice as often as a male colleague in order to prove it "wasn't some fluke."

Also, who decides on "merit" and "ability?" Most real-world problems are not math equations with clear answers. In that case, a homogeneous group is going to decide that merit is based on their group's definition. A diverse group will create a broader definition that accounts for a wider array of ideas and approaches.
I'd suggest you don't write any manifestos at work, obviously you'll be caught unaware by how people read your text.
> But, like a lot of other reasonable people, I'm not open to that dialog

One of the reasons why even gruesome speech is considered protected is so that people with such opinion can speak out and let everyone know who they are. If someone speaks in favorable terms about sexually abusing children, you will think twice about sending your children to that person's home. However, if such speech is prohibited, you will never know this person's intention and that would put the children living near that person at risk

You personally do not have to debate them, but their speech should still be protected

Sunlight is the best disinfectant
> he didn't explicitly celebrate the left wing tenants of equity

in fact he pointed directly to the flawed logic that supports them.

poor guy had no idea what was coming.
I agree as someone liberal/progressive, thinks the manifesto is generally idiotic, etc. Progressives are doing themselves a huge disservice to cede the moral authority on free speech to the alt-right.
the 1st amendment of the constitution is a prohibition of the federal government enacting a law that limits freedom of religion, expression, or association.

freedom of speech is a far more general moral principle and social norm. we ought not conflate the two and there is much more utility in discussing the more general case of freedom of speech and not the narrower more legalistic case of the 1st amendment.
Real physics nerd, non-popsci answer: everything that is obersed rather than conjectured about the universe implies that it has no "outside" and your question is a bit like asking what is North of the North Pole. It just isn't a meaningful concept, like "before the big bang" or "what did the universe expand into."
This is a curious strawman, but I'll play, what the hell?

I believe you and I agree that there has been systemic oppression against, let's choose african-americans in particular. Slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, Block-Busting, these are pretty cut-and-dried examples.

So the government did this stuff. I maintain that, as beneficiaries of our forefathers' efforts in establishing this country, we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes. It's a great benefit to live here and I have to be honest, I didn't do shit. I was born here. I did nothing but get born. My grandfather fought, my father fought, on for several generations. I am a businessman, that's what I do, and that's fine.

But there's unfinished work to be done. I think we owe a debt to continue that work. And this injustice is one that merits redress. Would you do nothing? Can you argue that point? Do you have a better idea? I hear so much from the right that basically boils down to "let somebody else do it." And that's... disappointing to me, as a fairly conservative guy with fairly conservative values. I really do believe in this dumb 'America' thing and I believe it merits sacrifice. An old-fashioned idea, I realize.
Google Fires Author of “Outrageous” Memo
Yes, but when you have conservative governments, they try to enforce such notions. Then have an abysmally narrow minded point of view of the world and they try to make regressive changes to the country.

and no, the defining feature of any govt is not to enfore its way of thinking on others, it is to govern others in a proper way.

but at least in India, politics has become a business.
That's the wrong link, and you should not be reading the Gizmodo version anyway, as they stepped away the charts and citations.
> gender pseudoscience

you're saying he was putting it forth, or addressing it?
You can address an unbalanced hiring pool of qualified candidates (i.e. your 90%) by expanding the hiring pool (through various methods) until its balance comes closer to the balance of the overall population. Doing this doesn't require discriminating against anyone. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... for example, there are other tech companies with race balance much closer to national averages. It's certainly possible to pull more women and people of color into your hiring pool, and you don't ever need to turn down a single person based on their white skin color to do it. The universities you hire from and your degree requirements for applicants can both have a significant impact on things and it's easy to adjust those.

The downside is that some qualified candidates (white man and woman of color alike) will potentially miss out on jobs once the candidate pool is grown, because you've pulled a bunch of extremely talented people into the pool who set the bar higher. That could certainly make people feel discriminated against if they don't have enough insight into the process.
DEF CON 25 – Elie Bursztein – How We Created the First SHA 1 Collision
Thanks for your response!

This isn't a pharmaceutical trial but there's no reason why we can't follow along with the author's analogy of 'false negatives'.

Here are his words from 'The Harm of Google's Biases':

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and
I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve
a more equal gender and race representation, Google has
created several discriminatory practices:

He goes on to list his examples, which include the following:

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

I think you may have misread his position earlier; I noted that you misspoke when talking about this particular statement (i.e., whether the false-negative rate applied to 'diversity' vs 'non-diversity' candidates)

EDIT:

Didn't see your statistical comment. Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.

The fact that the author uses the phrase 'lowering the bar' suggests that he is also thinking of this statistical requirement.
That's one thing I haven't read about yet, what happened to those oxygen levels of the distant past? Has anybody tried to estimate oxygen levels over time, especially during the extinction event?
I had no idea (I am from another continent) thanks for the information.

Do you know how they calculate the ratios for the pool of candidates? It seems it is not a easy thing to do.
Diversity is good for companies. Diverse companies are more profitable.

Regardless, your clever analogy doesn't apply. Companies are welcome to be political in their own environment. They own it. Employees are not. They're employed at-will.
As a podcaster and lover of podcasts I wanted to say a big thank you to IFF. And yes I'm a financial supporter, you should donate too.
Mechanical Television: Incredibly simple, yet entirely bonkers
In fairness to the internet lynchers -- the distinction between modern day Nazi's and the prose in that memo are pretty subtle. No one is stupid enough to come right out and say that they hate women in the workplace, yet I've worked with people who have told me that before -- yet their public persona looks just like this authors.

While you may be legally required to give him the benefit of the doubt -- any person who works with him that gives him that same benefit is probably naïve.
That didn't even seem like the main point. The main point was that people are psychologically oppressed: you can't even talk about the possibility of different gender behavior being rooted in biology without fear of retribution.

He was right about one thing.
> but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.

I've seen smart people pointing at 'evidence' on both sides of the discussion. Your claim that can 'irreparably' harm google is equally baseless IMO.
Speech is "protected" from intervention by the state. It's not protected from commercial and social consequences, nor could it reasonably be, because we also have the freedom to choose who we associate with.
Hi Marak! I’m Fouad and I work at Segment, specifically on this program.

To provide a bit of additional context, we launched the program on March 23rd (which closed on May 8th), received 285 applications, and then selected four of them as fellows on June 20th. We notified everyone that had applied that day.

From there, we still had to coordinate the final logistics with the fellows who were selected. A few were at full-time jobs and needed time to coordinate long-term sabbaticals, so we’ve had to delay the announcement on the selection process.

As far as why you weren’t contacted, this is totally my fault and an honest mistake. Even though the deadline was May 8th, we still had an ‘apply late’ form that was able to submit applications for late participants. However, nobody was monitoring the form after June 20th since we’d already accepted the fellows and were still figuring out the logistics with them. I just checked your application and it came in on June 21st.

I’m really sorry about that, we’ll do better here next time–I honestly feel terrible for botching the logistics, and can totally understand the frustration. For what it’s worth, nobody had seen your application until now, and I removed the application form earlier today to ensure this mistake doesn’t happen again.

Happy to answer other questions here or at open@segment.com, we’ll be announcing the four fellows in September.
Would you want employees sending out chain letters implying other employees should not be there? I would fire them on the spot. No "SJW" conspiracy need be applied. That's just unprofessional and out of line.

Employees are free to say whatever they want on a personal blog on their own time.
No, Google was clear that he violated the code of conduct. Since it's plainly clear that he did, and since we can safely assume he's not a member of a protected class, any random assertion of retaliation will be thrown out. Any discovery requests will have to be tied to the code of conduct, which isn't particularly interesting even if it did get out.
Well, the health care issue seems to say otherwise.
Read the Draft of the Climate Change Report
A lot of people seem to think the reaction to his words was too strong.

But that's the point of being more cautious at work than you are in your personal life. You don't know how people will react. Most people are uncomfortable even identifying their choice of political party at work.
Metformin is the generic. Glucophage is its equivalent brand.
See this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
> Did you consider the opposite questions with your male colleagues?

No, I didn't consider it about anyone until they gave me a reason to. Prior to that email I had no reason to think that anyone working there was anything other than the best of the best. Well-intentioned policies can have resounding negative effects.

To your second point -- I'm not saying bias isn't real. I'm saying certain methods of counteracting bias have a strong potential for collateral damage.
In US, only 1.5% plumbers are female:
http://www.contractormag.com/blog/stop-calling-yourself-plum...

In IT, in 2008 women held 25% of all professional IT jobs in the US: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/03/22/women-...

An order of magnitude difference.

I have never seen discussions about gender-based discrimination for plumbers, or biological or sociological factors preventing women to seek career in plumbing. My personal opinion, on average, women just don’t want to do plumbing. And the society seems to be OK with that.

I wonder what’s so special with the software development that causes companies to do positive discrimination, gender-based hiring targets, and other stuff these companies apparently do in the US?
Unlike in many countries, in US in most states employment is "at-will" this sounds nice and friendly but it means officially they can let the employee go for any reason at any time unless that reason is one of discrimination due to a limited set of categories. Of course people are discriminated all the time based on religion, race, sexual preferences, age, gender etc, it is just that is not the official reason. It can always be molded into some "performance review", "downsizing", "business goals" etc. kind of thing. Proving otherwise requires an expensive lawsuit looking for patterns over a longer period of time and candidates or requires someone to blow the whistle and say "oh when the CEO say 'culture fit' we really mean they are of a wrong race or gender, everyone knows that around here..."
I think a useful litmus test is to consider the worst-case depth of whatever you're building. I often feel safer writing my own userland stack, even for stuff like DFS in an interview.

You can't always know how much of the implementation stack will already be used by whatever calls your code, after all. It's a weird kind of "shared resource".
I read your wording as implying that the average woman is nearly fungible compared to the average man, with any (minimal) differences being able to be patched over with a spritz of training. Which I think doesn't give women enough credit in some physically demanding jobs, as they really have to work hard to be on par with their male counterparts.

But maybe I read too much into the wording, and regardless I agree it's a rabbithole w.r.t. programming jobs so I acquiesce.
One of the biggest problems that Google has with it's employee retention is imposter syndrome.

You take a lot of really smart people and get them to work together, and most of them are going to feel like they're not as smart as their peers.

Anything that creates self-doubt is going to really fuck up their retention.

Anyone who writes a manifesto to do just that should expect they'll be promptly walked out of the building.
Perhaps I misread it, but it sounded like all the gender differences he claimed were backed by research. What were the factual claims he got wrong?