skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a tantrum firing but it's also not a firing with cause and it steers close to free speech.

If Pao could sue KPC&B, I think he stands a chance, unrelated as they are, it suggests suits can go forward on slim allegations and here he has evidence clear as day they fired him for having a difference in opinion on their hiring practices. He personally didn't discriminate nor personally conduct himself untowards anyone. He offered some (unconvincing evidence about how women don't have the same aptitude as men --but you are likely to find evidence Google does have internal hiring goals and allows a culture which virtue signals against the majority culture) and they didn't like it.

Thing is, if this had been a woman or minority citing some dubious data about how more women and minorities should be hired (which I agree with but on other principles), we would not even blink at it, if it even would have surfaced)
>I didn't even read the document in question

Then why are you assuming you know what it said?
They sample resumes from various source (online hiring boards, recruiting companies, etc.). They also do compare companies to their industry average for their region to see if a company is hiring abnormally compared to similar companies. Companies with 50 employees have a lot more variation than companies with 1000 employees, they're very aware of the related sampling biases and do the best they can, they employ a good amount of statisticians and sociologists. The margin for error is also quite high, the kind of auditing I'm talking about is meant to catch very serious, long term, company wide systemic discrimination.

After companies grow to a certain size (I think >50 employees), they are also obligated to record demographics information about applicants in the form of voluntary surveys in their application process.
> And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.

He provides no evidence to back the conclusions he draws from that data though. It reminds me of some articles or posts you might see briefly gain traction on the internet where the author starts from a point backed by one or two reputable sources and proceeds to use those references to back an argument that lies well outside the bounds of the original data.

As one of the authors of a paper cited in the memo puts it:

> In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large [1]

[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Whoops, thanks for the catch. Have updated and also added OpenZFS to that sentence.
That's just absurd. The only people who have that data would be violating a contract by disclosing it, and I'm not even one of them.
If it is really true that women make 87% of men for the same work, any company that is driven by profit would exclusively hire women. The alternative would be that sexism is so rampant that it trumps profit driven motivation, am I missing something, or is that what you are suggesting?
The field of study of the causes of unrepresentative populations and the strategies for mitigation of those causes.
So just recently I realized that oil is still how we get tires. Even a country full of electric cars needs tires. What can be done about that? Brainstorm and....go!
Not at all. I don't know what's become of this country this election cycle, but the left have become the violent ones.
You're somewhat correct with your analysis. The bar stays the same, but on average those who get a more detailed analysis done will be closer to the bar than those who are subjected to coarser grained measures. So, it's wrong to say it lowers the bar, but it's right to say that it ends up giving you more people who are very close to the bar. Perhaps a better way to word it would be that Google's diversity hiring method(of looping back around for a closer look on "diverse" candidates) shrinks the error bars on the bar

Imagine it this way: You're a fisher. The Law says that you can only catch fish which are >= 12" long. If you're caught with < 12" fish, bad things happen, but otherwise you want to maximize the amount of fish you catch.

You have two ways of measuring length: a crude wooden stick with some fat lines on it which mark approximately 12" - this is quick but only approximate. You also have a high precision caliper which can tell you the length down to .001", but it takes 2x as long to make the measurement.

You're interested in catching lots of fish, so if any fish you catch are a little close to that line, you just throw them back with one measurement.

90% of the fish you catch are red, but about 10% of the times you catch a green fish, which are really sparkly and fun, so you change your standard: if the green fish on first measurement is really close to 12"(not close enough to keep), instead of throwing it back like a red fish, you bust out the caliper and measure it more precisely, and throw out anything < 12".

So, at the end of the day, assuming red and green fish are distributed equally across lengths in the ocean, what would the distribution of kept fish look like? Would the mean and median length of your green fish be higher or lower than the mean and median of your red fish?
Asians are overrepresented because of the way immigration laws shifted in 1965, combined with rapidly changing economic conditions in India and China. 50% of Asians in the US hold a college degree, compared to 1% in Asia, so this is not representative of Asians as a whole, but the well-off, high caste, etc. Not to mention if you look at subgroups (refugee populations like the Vietnamese or Cambodians) the numbers reflect those situations.
HBO Hackers Leak Top Executive's Emails, Demand Ransom
But did the console's software checking help in that case? Either way you're going to have a customer complaining about problems.
>Snapshots may help, but they depend on the damage being caught before the snapshot of the good data is removed. If you save something and come back six months later and find it’s damaged, your snapshots might just contain a few months with the damaged file and the good copy was lost a long time ago.

The author seems to misunderstand the purpose of snapshots. As frequently [1] pointed out, snapshots are not in fact backups and should not be used for longer term storage.

Also the same argument can be used on Backups: "Backups may help, but they depend on the damage being caught before the backup of the good data is removed. If you save something and come back six months later and find it’s damaged, your backups might just contain a few months with the damaged file and the good copy was lost a long time ago."

[1] http://www.cobaltiron.com/2014/01/06/blog-snapshots-are-not-...
>Holding a view that inherently biases them against a whole gender does make them a work liability.

That is your own fabrication. Please stick to what was actually said. They simply showed a lack of faith in their companies hiring practices (making sure diversity candidates were not accidentally turned away) being in line with their stated goals (hiring on merit). On principle, its no worse than employees complaining a bunch of new employees "got in easy" through an aqui-hire. If additional evidence was to be unearthed that this person is actually a raging bigot, then sure, bring out the pitchforks.

>If anything, by firing him Google might be saving money in future gender-based discrimination lawsuits. On that alone, the "laissez faire capitalists" should stop moaning about this.

Indeed, if we're operating on feelings and perception alone, then firing this individual probably makes a lot of sense from a PR standpoint.
Yes, but the beginning of those conversations can't be, "you're biologically inferior at doing the same job as me." That's not "engaging in reasoned debate", it's being an asshole.

We can have a discussion about the merits of public companies engaging in diversity programs without starting from that premise though.
What a great quote. I find myself fearing the left more than the right because the left can actually execute. They have Hollywood, the newsmedia, the arts, academia, the entire public education system, etc, and they're routinely infringing on people's rights. The right? They can't even enforce bathroom rules in their own backyard.
So differences exist, but those differences don't make any difference?

Do any differences ever make a difference in performance? Like a particular tribe of Kenyans utterly dominate distance running events, west Africans utterly dominate sprinting events what accounts for those differences?

What's lost in all this and that I have seen zero evidence presented for is that I am in no way convinced that the population groups that are "under-represented" as software professionals have much interest in being software professionals.

Whatever differences in capacity that may exist among groups the differences in interests are surely just as big or bigger.
Also, it's a HUGE controversy in the scientific community that he and Crick got the Nobel prize and most of the credit for discovering the structure of DNA, and Rosalind Franklin gets none. I thought that was well known.
Furthermore, what happens when your boss doesn't say that; you make some objective remarks that she wasn't the best candidate, but she is hired anyways. I suppose this is why you have randomized groups interviewing without knowledge of who is doing the interviewing. By abstracting this away, your bias against the candidate will only be your bias alone in review. Collectively, the majority of interviewers would have to conclude she is unqualified, and given the systemic bias men have in being more critical of women, you would have to make sure you had women mentors also interviewing.

In this scenario, if she ends up being hired, your feedback that she wasn't the best could lead you to the conclusion that maybe others saw something you didn't. Or perhaps, like anyone in an interview, they were off their game for a bit. It's not totally unsound of a conclusion to make.
The sad part is that underworld nazi trees would make a subculture which will be much worse than it would be if you actually talk with them.

Another part: this is a fairly left leaning site ( which I love! It is hard to find well argued leftist talking points as a libertarian ), and I'm not leftist. I get positive points in sum, which means that the majority of people are agreeing with me ( or maybe just see that I'm not trolling...). And this is not 4chan or not even reddit.

Sadly Donald Trump won the election. This strategy doesn't work if a very big chunk of the society are 'nazis'. You have to talk to them.
Might want to add company size and team size(s). Many of these points show it is most likely for small to medium sized companies. For an enterprise the checklist does not entirely hold due to more specialized roles. Though there are some good tips.
It's entirely possible to point out that both sides of the market may be harmed when "disrupting" a regulated industry. AirBnB takes a cut of the savings, but the risks are borne by the market participants, whether that means having your property trashed by bad guests, or your trip ruined by bad hosts. The "predator" in your analogy would be AirBnB itself.
Sounds like alot of engineers are afraid of women
Encode computations as NP hard graph optimization problems. Use the public computation resources to solve the hard part, but keep the labels of the nodes and edges in the slower encrypted computing resource.
One difference is that Indians got their independence, while the US still occupies California...
You are right, according to quantum mechanics. If you have a pair of electrons in a product state and measure the spin of one of them, you instantly know what the "other particle's" spin is going to be (if you knew what the initial state was). When you "peek at a card", you "make a measurement" and alter the system.

For anything that exists outside of a light-cone around the first electron, a measurement of the second electron will be truly random from the measurer's perspective.
Some people maintain personal blacklists.
After being receptive to this article at the outset, I've become much more skeptical after thinking about it some more, to wit:

1. Why 10 years as the forward return period -- would be nice to see the situation for other return periods, even close to 10 years. Granted, it is a round number and doesn't appear to be cherry-picked, but still.

2. Why 1952 as the starting point -- presumably because the data from FRED starts there, but can this not be extended further back?

3. Why an implausibly linear relationship between the equity allocation percentage, which is bounded (0%-100%) vs. the returns, which is unbounded on either side, over such a large range of values? What is the mechanism to explain this? In other words, what is the proposed model that transmits allocation percentage into a return, even if the directionality of correlation is at least likely? What happens around 0% and 100% allocation -- do the extreme cases make sense?

I'd like to run my own data before I believe this.
Rule #1:writing dumb things gets you fired.

Rule #2: if you are inclined to write dumb things, bounce it off a buddy before you press Enter/send

Rule #3; pretend you want to be on the Supreme Court. When you write an opinion, even at a young age, do not write controversial things. Keep low to the ground
Which demonstrates something interesting, here: It's clear this essay is a Rorschach test.

For some, it's simply a critique of ineffective hiring practices.

For others, it's veiled sexism dressed up with statistics to lend it an air of legitimacy.

Seen that way, this is a pretty interesting social science experiment, albeit at the expense of his job (if not his career)...
Why would computer science be so different from other STEM fields that have radically higher proportions of women?

The data from other professions overall seems to be in line with a "women less interested in systemizing activities" http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

In particular, why is math so much better?

It's a much smaller field, with far fewer lucrative jobs. For any given smaller fields, there could be a number of reasons why it is more or less equal. My hypothesis is that men are biologically more inclined toward geeking out and doing coding or such for fun. If men who are good at math are also geeking and out and coding, while women just do their high school math homework, women would have a comparative advantage at plain math as opposed to computer science.

This would suggest that the gender gap could be reduced by forcing women and men to do computer programming as part of a standard high school curriculum. But the idea of forcing women to do something other than what they do in their free time, just to close a gender gap, seems to me pretty appalling totalitarian.

Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity

Reading the studies, some things are positively correlated, some are negative. Some things have no correlation. There are lots of controls and data manipulation going on, hard to tell if the dredged for the results or not. And if you look at other types of studies you see the opposite result -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability

If the scores are equal, this would suggest no bias in selection. If women are unfairly excluded from computer science, or face a higher bar due to discrimination, then since they were more selected their scores should be higher.

A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems

Keep in mind girls mature faster and differently, so differences in elementary school aren't all that predictive of differences later.
I cannot believe what I'm reading in this thread, especially from usernames I recognize and respect.
If this is really what is ascertained from this, our two sides' differences are too large to be reconciled.
Consider maybe some people truly want to work with the best of the best, ignoring race or gender. Let the cards fall where they may based on merit.
There's two kinds of probability in question.

One concerns a lack of knowledge, like in your cards example. In that case, the probability is an expression of your state of understanding of the deck, and is not a property of the deck itself. The physical details of the deck and the situation it is part of could be entirely deterministic and we could still talk about this kind of probability. In this case your knowledge is independent of whether it is probabalistic or not.

The other is whether the universe contains fundamental randomness, such that you could say it is literally "probabalistic". And in this case whether that is true or not is independent of our knowledge of the probabilities.
I think the obvious point that the authors missed is that Google is not a University nor a scientific journal. It's a workplace and the author of the memo, just called into question the "biological" ability of women to be engineers.
I stutter. It's part of my life. I also speak 3 languages, 2 since childhood and I've always wondered if multilingualism contributed to it.

Sometimes I do apologize for it, just because I feel embarrassed for the people having to listen to it and don't want them to feel like I am having a stroke.

Some coworkers and family members help me finish my sentences. It heard it bothers other people who stutter, I'm ok with it.
I think you might just be afraid of women.
VT studies reactions to driverless cars with a driver dressed like a seat
> someone should have sat down with this particular employee to explain what controls are in place to ensure consistent hiring standards are enforced while being sensitive to the requirements of people from different backgrounds

He knows them. Everyone knows them. The average Alphabet employee does multiple interviews a month, sometimes multiple interviews a week (complaining about how many interviews you have to do is of the favorite pastimes in the company.) We are trained for this, and - surprise - none of the training says (or even suggest) 'you should lower your standards for minority candidates.' In fact, none of the interviewing training even mentions gender or ethnicity.

I feel that this guy is coming from a disgruntled conservative-leaning position where he feels the company values don't represent his. That's a valid concern, but there's plenty of companies out there. He should just leave and find one that has values matching his.

> This was not the case at the company I worked for and it was a very negative thing

That's sad. Hope you had better luck with the next one!

> Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.

Sorry, didn't meant to be offensive. I just know intrigue (which this memo tries to stir up) is the shortest path to a dysfunctional workplace.
fuck shaving. once a week, whether my wife demands it or not.
There was a time during the campaign that there was a real and honest debate about how the D campaign should have messaged against him. On the one hand, focus on his policies, but the problem there is that it would have "normalized" his behavior. So they made the choice to focus on how he's not normal. I guess it's easy to believe it's the wrong choice now but I'm not sure it was such a clear choice then.

OT of course!
Like it or not, I think speaking openly against defined corporate dogma will get you in trouble in most places. He should probably have realized that and adjusted his course accordingly. Outright being fired is a pretty harsh sanction, and in this case it probably only came to this after the story blew up and Google had to exert damage control in public. A more conventional response would be an uncomfortable talk with your manager and the implicit warning of your career being sidetracked. That alone is enough to keep most people in line.

I don't think the core of this matter is if he was right or wrong, or if he overstepped the red line of PC. I think it's about any culture or any company having things that you shouldn't say. You can challenge these but you do so at your own peril. I think if a Google employee wrote a ten-page, widely circulated, manifesto on the ickiness of ad trackers, he or she would get into similar trouble.
I remember michaelochurch talking about closed allocation for a while now.
This is pretty interesting. Though I think Google is right to fire this guy, the collateral damage to themselves is an interesting thing to follow.

Whether he was right or wrong, he has hurt the company. I think he is wrong to be sure. But it doesn't matter.

It is also interesting because, a loss in a major legal case may throw up interesting possibilities in the stock market. Of course, one needs to be much more legally aware, than I am, to take full advantage of these possibilities.
New AI algorithm monitors sleep with radio waves
Is that a thing? or did you just make it up? Can you link a couple .edu departments.

Does this field just care about "unrepresentative populations" of people interested in coding, or do they also care about "unrepresentative populations" of olympic sprinters, fishing boat crews, and kindergarten teachers?
Given how frequently some are equating wrong opinions as violence, it seems to be a matter of time before they respond in kind.
The most well-preserved mummy
Unfortunately if a settlement is made it will be confidential. Even if it was illegal, maybe it was the best course for google? Imagine if, say, 10 female engineers publicly quit google because they wouldn't fire James. That is going to be some really bad press, along with losing presumably valuable employees. They can short circuit that process by perhaps firing him illegally, and then settling at a later date out of court. The SJWs get their Hitler fired and Google doesn't take another reputational hit
I'd go one step further and say that he's being fired for completely misunderstanding the nature of Google's diversity efforts. He's responding to an attempt to create an equitable work environment. Google is more interested in creating a PR narrative.

These are complex issues that will take decades to fix starting with programs at the elementary school level and fundamental shifts in the messaging and feedback our society gives to children, young adults and all the way up to college students. And yet people are expecting Google to make significant progress on the issue within a couple of years. It's not really a realistic expectation to have of Google, but there are real market consequences for Google if they're seen not to care enough.

Google can make it look like they truly care about it and are solving it, but only if people don't look too closely or start pointing out flaws. This manifesto is an exercise in looking too closely and pointing out flaws. Whether his points, themselves, are flawed or whether they have merit is entirely beside the point.
That what, Gizmodo might mislead people for clicks?
When bots fight, who settles it?
Yes, but so? We shouldn't just be indiscriminately building anywhere we want, and risking lives.
These look fascinating, thanks.

I tried to crack this problem, and ended up (very naively) resorting to substituting division with modulo operation that is, a%(b+c) + b%(a+c) + c%(a+b) = 4 of which the min solution is a=1, b=2, and c=4. I am glad that the true solution involved EC which, if my understanding is correct, is basically modular operations in high-dimensional space.
How Google stores and managed its code