skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That comes across as unfair by definition, but practically there are no such ways to do what you've claimed.

It's unfair in the sense that this progressive or far left ideal is allowed to be pushed onto entire organizations and by the media as de facto "right" or "correct", which is inherently a political position and would likely offend anyone who disagrees with it. If these processes and programs should be publicly enacted on people who disagree with them, it's unfair then to disallow any discussion about them under an implicit threat of termination. Google just confirmed that threat is very real. I know many conservatives here (a classical liberal / libertarian mostly myself, which is far too "right leaning" for this area) who are actually scared of any political discussion due to this exact threat, even though those with the "correct" opinions can openly discuss them without any fear of repercussions. I don't think they should because inherently politics brings out discussion and debate, often vigorous forms of it, and that's not generally the best thing for the office, but because that discussion/debate is effectively banned here, it's completely fine to express leftist and socialist ideals publicly, even if in extremely poor taste.

Secondly, if you were to decide to bring up issues with these programs with a person responsible (for instance in Google's case, this VP of diversity) you'd get a predictable dismissal, or they'd silently drop whatever issue you raise, which means you have no actual means with which to present these viewpoints. She publicly dismissed the entire thing without actually refuting any argument that was made, with language that effectively sounded something like "this is wrong think, and Google doesn't agree with this wrong think." You could do it outside of work, but you lose the context and the specifics of the program, and more importantly the impact any such discussion could have on your immediate environment.

These discussions do need to be had, and where they're being had, the majority of even liberal minded people tend to agree with the author of this piece, but it's hard to know if that's a consensus (even at 500,000+ views for instance on each video on YouTube) or if it's just an echo chamber because even demanding rigor and evidence of the ideas behind diversity is taboo in far too many places. For instance tptacek can be found in these very comments essentially arguing that this topic of discussion isn't open because it's been decided. By whom? How can any discussion of highly debatable topics like this be had if people like him and Google are just going to say "it's not up for debate because I'm right" in order to shut down any discussion before it can even begin, hilariously in this case by likening this to discussing child labor or marital rape? It's nice to see logical fallacies are alive and very well with people who otherwise seem fairly intelligent.
> ...any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims.

It's hard to see a fair and general principle underlying this. People who publish false or mistaken things internally should be fired?
"that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny"

This is completely false! He absolutely does not say that, he says women to not prefer to compete for those jobs. He might still be wrong but you are grossly misrepresenting his statement in an attempt to demonize his lack of PC orthodoxy.
Human contribution to climate change isn't questionable it is nearly certain (>95% chance).

Recent decades are likely the warmest in 1500 years. What data opposes this view?
> then implying that the change is entirely man-made

Where did you get this? Some direct quotes from the article, emphasis added:

"…human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change."

"…it is possible to attribute some extreme weather to climate change."

"…significant advances have been made linking human influence to individual extreme weather events since the last National Climate Assessment was produced in 2014. Still, it notes, crucial uncertainties remain."

"…“relatively strong evidence” showed that a man-made factor contributed to the extreme weather."

"Worldwide, the draft report finds it “extremely likely” that more than half of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 can be linked to human influence."

"Human activity, the report goes on to say, is a primary culprit."

Nothing here comes close to asserting that the change is entirely man-made. In fact, the article is quite careful to avoid saying that, over and over again.

This doesn't require an especially close reading to discover. Rather, you would have to go out of your way to distort what the article is saying in order to reach the conclusion that you did.

FWIW, I doubt you're engaging in this distortion on purpose. More likely it's a subconscious reaction to encountering information that you don't want to be true.
On the other hand objective randomness is a black box. You can describe how it behaves at the surface level (so functionally it is usable), but by definition you can't have a finite model of it, so what is inside? No answer by definition - something infinite.

So why X happens instead of Y?

1. Let's propose an unexplainable, unmodellable infinite entropy source under everything

vs.

2. X happens and so do Y, and one is observed at a certain probability due to anthropic principle - like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

The first is somehow psychologically less satisfying answer for me, although - of course - I accept that calculation works either way. The second at least not an unimaginable infinite, and in the end leaves me with less "why?".
That's a fair assessment, at very least it's shoddy editing, if they can even afford editors these days.
An alternate way to phrase it for you, then. Why are you assuming that these programs do not produce the "best of the best"?
AL voted 30%+ for Hillary. I doubt you had 30% Googlers feel comfortable declaring affiliation with Trump or Republicans in general.

Carter won in '76 and it's been within +-10% R/D till 2000. So not that lopsided as you might suppose.
Google Fires Employee Behind Anti-Diversity Memo
We have two entries in our DNS which point to 127.0.0.1/::1 - localhost and elvis.

This enables the following on Solaris and similar systems:

$ ping elvis
elvis is alive
So what are the criteria for ideas which cannot even be discussed? Equating "gender differences are real and should inform our approach to diversity" to holocaust denial seems absurd.
It's weird to me that half isn't manmade. I've never heard this before.
Conflation and a strawman.

What you're referring to is the idea that climate change exists. Nobody disputes this.

The headline describes "drastic impact of climate change on U.S" happening today.

"X exists" != "X is drastically affecting America today"
Is this why Google is currently under investigation by US Labor Department for paying women significantly smaller wage than men? [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Personally, I believe addressing sexism is necessary, but not sufficient (to solving underrepresentation).
HBO Hackers Release Ransom Note and New Trove of Stolen
Saving the environment is great. However, why does the solution always seem to involve the U.S paying hundreds of billions to a supranational entity that is unaccountable as was outlined in the Paris accord? The rubber always seems to hit the road on climate change with a global tax, levied mostly on the U.S, paid to a global government.

Let's fund solar power and electric cars and ways to use energy more efficiently, great. However, why is it that if one thinks it's a bad idea to set up an unacountable global entity with a multi-billion dollar budget one is accused of being anti-science?
Copy on write. :D
Well, except that a substantial percentage of Americans do believe that "God did ... create the world in seven days." Maybe they'll come around in another century or two. But maybe not, because maybe global civilization will have crashed by then. Either way, I'll be dead. So hey.
His argument had flaws -> he is a misogynistic pig who went on a hate filled scree and should be fired immediately!! (wait what??)
I can't comment on the manifesto itself (perhaps his reasoning is correct, but he is misrepresenting the hiring practices at Google - how would I now?), but I would have fired him too, for practical reasons only:

- stirring up the discussion harms the company whatever the outcome

- not firing him would harm the company more due to public opinion on the subject

Also, if I were the author, I'd probably have shorted GOOG before publishing the document. For entirely practical and obvious reasons...
The combination is like something else: preventative medicine. You know the problem exists, so you're pro-active in doing something about the condition before it gets out of hand.
Ha! I remember discovering this as a teenager, that I didn't have to actually tidy up my room/desk to avoid getting yelled at, as long as I aligned everything in place at right angles. It's always good to put a name on the phenomenon.
Vivaldi has both the chrome omnibar and a separate search input.
I'm a woman and I defended him, even though I don't entirely agree with what he wrote.
Paying them equal to what the men get might be enough, since the last time people did a comparison, women at Google earned less. (It's possible this is fixed now, but since they aren't open with salary numbers, people assume it's not.)
Doesn't pass the sniff test. His memo was open, notorious, and even received a response from senior management.

More likely than the lawyers saying the firing was legal, is that Google decided the cost of an illegal firing was less than the cost of keeping him onboard.
> what surprised me was how political it was

> The workplace is no place for politics like this.

You could argue that affirmative action, because that's what it is about, is essentially a political stance ,and business are totally free to engage into these recruitment practices, but it absolutely follows a specific ideological thus political framework.

IMHO When you introduces political activism in your work place you will transform your work environment into a political battleground. period.
couple thousand years ago Roman Republic got de-facto replaced by dictatorship (Caesar) and soon after - Empire (Augustus).

Where "dictator" originally comes from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator

Finally LA Times got the news...
>fork

When I was younger and had most interest in non-useful things (in a boring sense) I came to "the theory" that each time observation or logical induction is performed, the universe splits into many variants ahead of time and these variants that produce "oops" in terms of contradiction simply disappear. Each time you see something weird but real, it is oops that survived, because you didn't see something contrary yet (and now you cannot, because only one thing has to be remaining).

That made me sad, because we could come to hyperdrives and FTL journeys to alien worlds, but some people in 20th century made few observations and conclusions that now prevented fun forever. Magic things were easy before the technology, now they are physics-hard. Our universe is spoiled in a very wrong way.
> It says a great deal that some people won't concede that a company like Google doesn't have "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates" even if the author was much more politically correct in their verbiage.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the author wrote, "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." In other words, not that under qualified candidates are given an offer if they're diverse but rather than qualified non-diverse candidates are passed on. This is not a pedantic clarification. I think that for many people the phrase "lowering the bar" overrode the second part about decreasing false negatives. To be fair "lowering the bar" is a very politically loaded term that typically implies that under qualified applicants are (in some people's views) unfairly accepted. The author was sloppy for this poor choice of words, and it likely cost him his job.

Many people would agree that some hiring practices make non-diverse candidates more likely to be rejected when they're qualified, but not that they make diverse candidates more likely to be accepted when unqualified (at least not to a significant degree). In fact, I am one of them. The way my company handles phone screens[1] largely fits this categorization. I think it's an acceptable way of bringing in people of backgrounds we don't often, and that it does not have a particularly large chance of causing under qualified applicants to be accepted. I do think it's fair to criticize the system as discriminating against the non-diverse candidates who don't get extra chances at the phone screen, and that stating as such is not saying that diverse candidate's had the bar lowered for them. But on the whole I think it's justified.

Edit: Here's the link to the comment in which I describe my company's phone-screen policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953762
Frankly I'm just annoyed that the way climate issues are presented is basically perfectly engineered to convince deniers that they're on to something.

In addition, there's a smugness high horsery which doesn't appeal to the kinds of folk who get swept up in these delusions. I notice the same problem with the anti-vax crowd, where a lot of the public has basically resorted to brushing them off and engaging in ritual defamation, instead of trying to be persuasive. The poor kids who grow up with anti-vax parents who will become less and less interested in vaccine the more people tell them they're dumb.

> ...he just seems to be fairly right leaning in his views.

I'm a Liberal Conservative. That is to say, I am interested in conserving Classical Liberalism: equal opportunity, free markets, free expression, personal sovereignty. For example, I see border protection as begrudging but necessary, and only because we have attractive social programmes. If the social programmes are not attractive then we can go back to 1918 (on that issue alone) when there was effectively no border. On social matters (consensual goings on in private bedrooms, the purchase of goods and services such as drugs and sex or guns and hair styling) I don't think the government should have a say. Ideally a society should have some voluntary social core though, since it seems societies without some level of social cohesion tend to collapse into nothing rather quickly.
> “Under Chavez, elections were still relatively fair. ”

Elections were never fair under Chavez. He seized control of the Supreme Court and undercut the ability of journalists, human rights defenders, and other Venezuelans to exercise fundamental rights.
As a child I used to stutter when reading aloud to myself. Practicing by reading whole books aloud helped a lot. Some books were more difficult than others, especially those with really weird sentence structure, or really short sentences, which used to get me out of the flow.

With practice, I stopped stuttering when reading aloud altogether, and then even when reading to other people (family members first). Talking to people however it's completely different matter, and it's still hard for me.

I think there's some common difficulty curve. For me, things that became easy with time (even when I've stopped practicing by reading aloud) are, in order: reading aloud to myself, talking with siblings and parents, reading aloud to others, explaining technical matters to friends, talking to younger colleagues, and lately talking to friends, even on the phone.

Talking to strangers is still difficult. I also find it gets harder the more unexpected is what I'm trying to say (for example, saying "sorry, I couldn't hear you, could you repeat that please?" instead of answering a question).

Partially related: there's a /r/Stutter subreddit (which I haven't opened in years), if you want to read about some other people's experiences.
Thanks for the comment, I intended it to implicitly come across that I was speaking about employment, where male privilege exceeds female privilege.
luxury != personal growth.
A very diplomatic way of putting it.
I absolutely agree.

As a side note: Its 6 days, not 7. Day 7 (the Sabbath) was for resting.

As a longer thought:
God, as a omnipotent being, obviously doesn't need to rest, and given the idea that he (for lack of a better pronoun) is essentially keeping the universe running himself, the whole concept of 'God resting' is obviously (to me, and many others) poetic. Looking at the rest of the Genesis creation story through 'poetic narrative' lenses:

From the beginning of the universe until the start of human written history, we can divide it up into Eons (non-specific but LONG periods of time):

Eon 1:
- The universe was 'formless' and chaotic.
- Pure energy / light and darkness / vacuum / void become separate.

Eon 2:
- The planets and other 'heavenly bodies' or galaxies start to spin together into units.
- Planetary atmospheres form. (The separation between 'waters below' (the unknown depths of the sea) and 'waters above' (the vast 'ocean' of space') from a ).

Eon 3:
- Focussing on Earth, the planet surface began to stabilise, continents appear.
- Plants and other 'basic' forms of life begin to show up and spread all over the planet.

Eon 4:
- The moon shows up, the atmosphere clears up a bit, stars are now visible, the earths spin is now stable re. Day and Night.

Eon 5:
- Animals! Firstly water based, then birds. Maybe huge birds (dinosaurs?) No non-bird land-dwellers yet.

Eon 6:
- Land based animals, 'finally' humans showing up.

Eon 7:
- Now. Beginning of written histories.

The above pattern is a pretty strict interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, with most of the poetic stuff stripped out. It's kind of interesting how much of it does kind of map to our current understanding of the beginning of the universe and our planet.

What do you think?
Then please link to some of these articles. You are doing what you are complaining about: merely asserting.
> It's a good movie.

Score 5.2 in IMDb disagrees.
My observation about conservatives on this issue has been that they become defensive when they hear "conservatives have caused global warming with their capitalism, and the only solution is to repudiate the entire conservative world view". It's only human to deny the problem exists in the first place if they are made to believe the choice is between denying the problem and adopting a world view they find untenable.
That post is a remarkable example of victim blaming. "Do you know how hard it is for ME now that you've gone and gotten people violently angry at you? People want to punch you in the face for something they think you said, and that's your fault!"
A couple quotes:

We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates

...

Overall, the results indicate the need for caution when moving towards ’blind’ recruitment processes in the Australian Public Service, as de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
Populism has little to do with letting the ruling party appoint the judges.
I did wonder about that. Applicants to YC submit their profile name. Many people list their identity and public projects in their profile. Responses here would make interesting fodder for a works-well-with-others algorithm.
The Polish government is working hard on abolishing an independent judiciary.

It's the beginnings of Gleichschaltung.
That medium post is exactly why dudebro Silicon Valley culture persists. It's all about "cooperation", "collaboration", "empathy" for your "peers" for these people. Which means if you're different from your "peers" (i.e. rich white liberal cis males) you're not a "cultural fit". If you don't drink beer all Friday with your "team" and then go to a strip club for some "teambuilding", you're not a team player. Which means you're a "bad engineer". Is it any wonder there's no diversity?
What's the guarantee that branded drugs won't have any side-effects. There's none. and they're pretty expensive too.
How to Rent Out Music Equipment and Space on SparkPlug
Research fields use field-specific jargon. Why is that surprising to you? If you look at a CS department page you'll fine plenty of content that makes no sense unless you have some understanding of the field, too.
"A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma."

Indeed. I also felt reminded of dynamics in the realm of religion.
He got let go for saying certain coworkers were less qualified based on their gender. You can't wrap whatever you want in "politics!" and then scream when you get into trouble for it. Sorry.
Matt Levine wrote an article (with charts!) on VIX[0] back in 2014 that basically says the same thing: VIX is more of a measure of past volatility than an indicator of future volatility.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-06-09/the-vix-i...
That sounds like something Tolkien said, "Words have power".
That's a city-level estimate. OP provides estimates based on your actual address.
Why did you present it as if this is just something that the guy "believes?" I thought that was the strongest argument of his memo and the perhaps the point with the biggest scientific backing.

If you wanted to pick out any argument out of those 10 pages to disassemble, you could have chosen any one of his arguments that haven't been corroborated by hundreds of years of scientific consensus.
Hoping to head down to origin for quick looksee.
In a thousand years archaeologists will write papers on our civilisation and the god we worshipped called Market. About how we obeyed the laws of Market, appeased the Market when it was unhappy, and how we had faith that Market could solve all problems.

As a society we've been trained or perhaps tricked to suppress our sense of justice and fairness In Gabor of money.
If "consequences" implies loud and effective speech that demolishes the speech it is responding to, or even an individual choice not to associate with the utterer, I agree. If it implies crap like doxing, boycotts, and professional sabotage, then I think something essential gets lost in our defense of free speech. Free speech isn't just an amendment, it's a basic principle that makes everyone safer.
Also https://xkcd.com/505/ (A bunch of rocks).
side note: I recommend that anybody who's headed for Burning Man read Brave New World before you go.

poly + molly + endless disposable entertainment ... it's hard to come to grips with, and incredibly scary.
Yes, it is really nice you made a thing to help others, but it makes me angry if somebody want to teach something with TERRIBLE CODE. If you want to teach people, you should be proficient, write clean, elegant and readable code without stupid mistakes! TEACHING IS A RESPONSIBILITY.
That's why there is so much shit software out there today...

I repeat, the intent is nice, but only people with high motivation and quality code should do it. If you do it for yourself, nice, ok, nobody cares, but don't teach bad taste, acceptable mistakes and stuff like this.

Yes, I could make a pull request and I will, but I don't have the time to make pull requests for every wannabe teacher ever.