skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He deserves the condemnation. He attempted to hide his disrespect towards diverse candidates by qualifying his statements with talk about "overlaps," "ranges in ability" and other similar statements. If he wanted to show respect towards the issue, and those affected by the issue, he could have focused on ways to address gender / diversity issues in tech. Instead, he focused on why he doesn't like gender diversity programs, wrapped up in some pseudo-scholarly talk.
Check out Andrew Friedman's work on "Closing the Free Will Loophole". It might be interesting.
And yet every single woman I've ever asked has had some pretty horrible stories regarding sexism, if not outright harassment. There's also still a horrible bro culture problem in a lot of places. In no way have we crossed a line where everything sexist has been fixed and now it's just all about witch hunts.
Why Do You Need to Know Interface Fundamentals?
Chrome Extension for IFTTT – unofficial
What are you paying, out of curiosity? 1% of AUM?
I love PWT. I think it is the right explanation for what we observe.

Other theories don't rule out nonlocality anyway. And I'd rather have nonlocality than their non realism!!
I don't think this is the tipping point. I think this is a sign of things to come...

It's a case of leverage. The more Google can be shown to be biased internally or overly 'left', the easier it will be for other countries or the current US government to make the case that they have too much power and act upon this.

Steve Bannon has already said that he wishes to treat tech giants as public utilities [0].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/steve...
If the pool of candidates is 10/90, I would agree a hiring goal of 10/90 is fine assuming that the pool of candidates is not also negatively impacted by bias. The pool of candidates, however, is widely accepted to be negatively impacted by bias (which is why you see things like female-friendly coding camps, etc).
PyCon 2013 joke incident might also qualify. Everyone lost there - both the accuser and the accused lost their jobs.
> I've now learned they will be soon be releasing a commercial product that is strongly related to the open-source project I submitted.

Is it someone from segment informed you about this upcoming commercial product? How did you learned about this info? What if there is no such plans or upcoming product?

Are you sure about their terms & conditions? Some companies include special clause to own or implement these ideas on their own.

I hope someone from segment will address your concerns.
honestly I haven't read the original post/email/letter. I'm sure most of the keyboard warriors you see on here as well as Blind or any other forums haven't read the whole thing either.

I have a feeling that people jumped into conclusions before reading it or understanding author's POV. I'm frankly surprised by Google's reaction. They should have debated this internally instead of firing an employee because h/she expressed their opinion. Even if the author was wrong, they could've countered his/her points by bringing proofs/scientific studies.
A hiring process can be flawed by excluding a pool of qualified candidates from consideration, even if the ones you hire are capable of performing their jobs.
"The workplace is no place for politics like this."

That's ironic. Because the politics that he criticizes are without a doubt left wing policies that ARE applied in Google, from top-down. I'm not saying they are bad policies, but they are political in nature.
> The paper confused sex and gender badly. E.g. Man and male are not nearly equivalent groups. How could someone who thought so deeply about the subject miss that?

Ok, but how do you propose the paper to be rewritten taking those into consideration.

Or do you suggest that Google force every employee go through a medical exam to determine their sex and make sure no one chooses to identify as a different gender to pass through the hiring process easier...

Sorry, I don't quite see what you're getting at there basically, it can interpreted in a few ways.
It's insane how fast it has happened. Just 4 years ago I would have thought it impossible that I would ever align myself with anything right-of-center. I honestly have no idea what to expect in the coming years, and I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks they know.
No, it would have to be a true semantic fork I believe.
I'd like to see your data supporting the assertion that qualified diverse candidates are rejected at greater rates. The thing is he wouldn't of been fired for arguing the opposite claim, this is clearly discrimination.
This is actually one of the points made here:

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...

"Still getting asked if I can handle being in a mostly male work environment in interviews in 2009 - I’ve been an engineer for 9 years, obviously I can. I know when I’m asked that question, I HAVE NO CHANCE AT THE JOB. It is nice they brought me in for equal opportunity survey points but don’t waste my time if you don’t take females seriously.”

The point is when you have a male dominated "bro"/"frat" culture, diversity programs are indeed just to meet labor standards - but they don't actually hold water. Which is why women end up leaving these places because people can't treat women like human beings. A diversity program becomes virtually useless if you can't keep people from leaving short of incentivizing them to deal with a company's toxic culture.
Just for the record, Ohio is very open-minded about the legality of marital rape:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/ohio/articles/2017-0...

And in up to 7 other states: http://www.thedailybeast.com/marital-rape-is-semi-legal-in-8...
Geometric algebra is "easier" to understand than plain-old imaginary numbers? Pourquoi?
I think he said the ratio of women / men in the company was matching or close to the reality. That there are more men interested in tech than women and that trying to achieve a 50/50 was a mistake. Then the based the disparity of women interested in tech because of biological reasons.

Sexims might exist and have and effect in hiring but for him the effect of the diversity program was bigger, and a result it could lead to hire less qualified individuals. He said that the company should hire based on skills and not in gender or other bias. And also it should change how it works internally to create a better environment for women where they can explode their skills, those one the men doesn't have.
Those checks Apple had to pay for Jobs mouthing off "you're fired" at semi-random employees did not come with only a six month severance despite "at will" work contract.

I imagine this ex-employee will get a generous severance or expect good lawyers knocking soon.
Here is the other one from today. I should turn this in to an app-style application for employers/recruiters to fill out before they contact me.
https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing-checklist/
I've never encountered a programming exercise where race, gender, or sexuality was a consideration in whether or not the code was correct.
Does NYC suffer from the "ghost train" phenomenon that plagues SF MUNI? The danger in waiting for a second train here is that there might not actually be one.
One thing I like about Russians and the Germans in professional circles is they indulge in unadulterated expression of opinions. Not to say they speak whatever thing comes to their mind, simply that they don't sugarcoat stuff. If you don't like it, it's upto you.

The employee in this case deserved a reprimand, not termination.
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach and working against institutionalized racism and sexism which has created the distribution of wealth and education and work culture that we have today.

I guess the one challenge I would put to this is that I find it difficult to believe that East Asians or Indians have been on the receiving end of any less discrimination than, say, Hispanics in the US, but yet they are now vastly over-represented in tech compared to their population statistics at large. They are so over-represented that they are now clearly discriminated against in areas such as college admissions at top tier universities, where being Asian essentially raises the requisite SAT bar by about 50 points.

You may think there needs to be a manifesto on a "White Male Persecution Complex Culture in Tech", but I'd be interested in why you didn't also write an "Asian Male Persecution Complex Culture in Tech."

Finally, I'll add that there is plenty of evidence it's not a "persecution complex". How do you square Github's reaction to their proposed Electron conference, where all the proposals were accepted in a completely blind process, but they decided they'd rather cancel the conference when it turned out all the proposals accepted were from men? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
When I read this manifesto, I thought "well, this is going to generate a lot of news".

What I did when I read it was substitute "woman" for "black", rolled back the clock to Jim Crow south, and read it again.

That might be an instructive exercise for anyone who hasn't actually experienced discrimination, or rather, primarily lives in the dominant side of any culture.

I would rather see this stuff out in the open, rather than hidden behind the glares and glances of colleagues. His firing is unfortunate, but totally understandable. This dialog could have ocured in a much better format.

In the famous words of Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other..."
I'm downvoting this because I'm tired of the implication that anyone who disagrees with some liberal policy or value must be doing so for sinister motives (and for the highly offensive implication that sinister motives are the purview of whites/males/Westerners).

If you must spew hate, could you at least choose a more interesting criteria than skin tone or genitals? These have been done to death.
Yeah, thank goodness Gmail blocks the hell out of content. Email was a wasteland before good spam filters existed.
In Australia we regularly have 'back burning' or 'controlled burns' where the fire brigade waits for a cool, non windy day and sets a bush fire around houses. This happens every few years so that when bush fires occur the area around houses has less combustible material and either places dont need firefighters or the firefighters can more easily protect property, letting the fire do its thing in non-critical areas.

Also through bush land they cut roads which also service as firebreaks, that way bush fires hit these gaps and should stop a proportion of the time.

Anyway, my point is I dont know we need to hate on 'rich people's houses' because 1) I would say even more ordinary people have houses in the bush, at least in Australia, and this feels like personal hatred without knowing your area and 2) Australia has clearly shown people can manage an enviroment (with occasional exceptions) to live within a bush/forest fire area.

I'm not sure how supported or funded this is in the states. And in Australia we have large volunteer groups of bush firefighters that help with back burns and when larger outbreaks of bush fires occur to increase manpower.
Firefox 55: WebVR for All Windows Users
This individual apparently has a biology PhD from Harvard, but only two published papers. How common is this in biology? Seems very low compared to computer science.
We just invented the jet engine for deep learning
That particular paper got a LOT of flames when it was posted to /r/MachineLearning

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/59v9ua/r_1...
A pro-science party wouldn't toe even the republican line on many of these issues and therefore "be racist".

It would say different races have ...

shudder

differences

They might even point out that the difference between men and women, as measured in DNA differences, is bigger than the differences between humans and mice. This might result in some actual differences, and likely not just in appearance.

Nobody seems to want to hear these obvious facts, we've just collectively agreed that we're going to ignore this and even change the science to reflect political opinion.

Apparently the message that yes, sexes and races are different, and we've chosen to ignore that is considered a racist attitude itself.
Can confirm, the headlines/summary articles are generally sensationalist/clickbaity. The actual document is more evenhanded than breathless journalists would have you believe.
You are completely wrong on this.

The market for developers is very very good, right now. Especially ex-googlers.

Maybe the big 5 tech companies won't hire him, because of the PR disaster that it would be, but any number of startups and small companies would be willing to do so.

Many companies wouldn't even bother to Google his name (personally, I've never seen anyone do that. I just get handed a resume). And even if they did, others would just keep it on the hush hush. Many small startups would be ecstatic to get a Google engineer for cheap.

Other engineers that have been on the receiving end of major scandals, have had no real long term consequences. EX: the donglegate guy was quickly employed elsewhere after he got fired.

Judging by many of the comments in this thread, there seems to be a lot of tech people HERE who are defending him, and would be willing to hire him if they were a hiring manager.
The "social justice" movement dates back, uh, centuries. Maybe you have heard of Jesus?

Even if you want to separate out a modern social justice movement, it certainly dates back decades.

It's fun to consider it in terms of the foundation of the United States and documents like the Declaration of Independence. The wealthy landholders that declared themselves to be free articulated things so clearly that a bunch of other people decided that they wanted in on that shit.
Why? Have you spent time living outside a city?
I don't know the reason why women are not interested in tech. I think there is an important biological component and also a cultural issue. But I am not sure of the cultural issue because in countries like Norway, one of the most equality countries, the ratios are higher than other countries, which doesn't make sense unless the biological factor is what affects the most.
Is it just me or is Google DNS not resolving .us domains?
Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) seem to not be resolving .us domains. Is anyone else having this issue? If so, why is it happening?

Google

nslookup about.us 8.8.8.8

Server:	8.8.8.8

Address:	8.8.8.8#53

server can't find about.us: NXDOMAIN

OpenDNS

nslookup about.us 208.67.222.222

Server:	208.67.222.222

Address:	208.67.222.222#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name:	about.us

Address: 156.154.193.226

Name:	about.us

Address: 156.154.42.226
If the theory were true, then why were the two largest fires in recorded North American history in 1919 and 1950 (which MacDonald, a wildfire expert, missed)? 5 and 4 million acres respectively, significantly larger than 2011 or 2016 Alberta fires.

The data does not support the theory, the fires over the past 70 years have been smaller.
I fundamentally reject the new definition of racism and sexism as requiring a power imbalance. Racial or gender prejudice is racial or gender prejudice. Full stop. Don't do it. This novel attempt to muddy the waters of racial prejudice by defining racism as the exclusive perk of minorities is self-defeating and ugly. A just and equal society is a better society for all within it, and by allowing the struggle to be characterized as a zero-sum game, we allow ourselves to be divided in the pursuit of basic human decency.
To be clear, he said nothing of the sort.
Perhaps tangential but related is the notion of wholly worker owned businesses - if jobs suck, why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles?

On deeper analysis the worker-owned business concept seems like it would improve things a lot for men and women ("people") alike. But I genuinely wonder why this isn't already more common. Is it an entrenchment thing? Is it really that the elite have so much power us wage-slaves are still scratching our way up from the bottom? Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable?

---

Like I said, a tangent. But this article notes that both sexes ("people") don't like working and this does seem to match my lived experience. I always wonder why we don't do more to change that...
Summary judgement is for dismissing merit-less cases. If he sues for "Retaliation for X," where that is not an actual cause for a suit it will get dismissed.
There's a couple interesting issues at play. One is that a profit incentive can be at work without the goal being to break even. For example, perhaps the goal is to subsidize by only $XXX million/year and above/beyond this goal is considered "profitable" with appropriate incentives.

Another is the issue of correlation/causation. Well-run systems may tend to be efficient in their use of monetary resources (almost by definition), but it's not clear that setting a for-profit goal will be a cure-all intervention that causes a system to be well-run.

It's also a big leap from setting profit goals to full-on privatization, which I'm skeptical of for several reasons. Private companies are often only pushed to be "good enough", better than the competition. A public transit system that is just barely better than a cab (say for daily work commute) is no good at all. Private companies tend to have short-term incentives, for instance, the CEO may get a bonus based on the current year's profit, which will be destroyed by investment in infrastructure. Companies care about maximizing revenue rather than welfare. Etc.
The White House Tech Summit Tackles a Sprawling Agenda
Makes sense from corporate think. But I doubt it's the correct decision, this only furthers narrative that we can't talk openly.
I wish the guy had written what other people had written. This stuff has been hashed, rehashed, refried, deep fried... and he got all the biology research wrong. It just seems that he did no research, instead thinking about his feelings a lot and claiming he got somewhere original without engaging the existing scholarship at all.

Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say. I am tired of guys not listening to me saying I'm a boring, normal woman who likes math/tech/computers, not a freak or a biological anomaly, some evolutionary mistake.
> I won't and can't judge whether the firing of that googler was justified but shareholders of google should have the right to fire whoever they bloody want.

Would you hold the same argument if I decided to acquire 51% of Google stock and fire all female employees? Or just the ones that decided to exercise their free speech? What shareholders wants comes second to government regulations to protect workers, for good reason.
Did you see the quillette [1] article that was briefly on the front page earlier? Four different experts write briefly their thoughts on the memo. While they don't necessarily agree with the author's judgment of the value of diversity programs, they unanimously agree with his points that the sexes are different and have different personalitie.

So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?

1. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
The context is about stopping fires. And roads do serve this purpose well. In Australia we cut roads through bushland for this purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak
This sounds a lot like the question of "does the set of all sets contain itself?" which is naturally a part of Russell's paradox. I can't offer more, but I don't think the concepts are dissimilar.
A hiring process is by nature a discriminatory event. Right?

You have a pile of resumes and you discriminate between the candidates during the selection process. This happens on a number of different criteria.

The criteria that we should not discriminate on are sex and race.

Anyone that doesn't agree with this is out of the mainstream.

The issue is that if you cannot discriminate on sex and race, and 90% (made up number) of your qualified candidates are men that are asian or white, then 90% of your workforce will be men that are asian or white.

So, then you have to make hard choices, guided by the current laws, and a desire to create a corporate culture.

If more than 50% of your users are women but only 10% (again, made up number) of your employees are women. AND you can legally choose a qualified woman over a qualified man. Then you have a good reason to hire the qualified woman over the qualified man.

TLDR; discrimination is part-and-parcel of the hiring process. discrimination on the basis of sex or race could be a legal and accepted thing for a company to do. discriminating on the basis of sex or race for bad reasons is bad.
"not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring" - this is not reality but only your imagination.
To tell the truth, I was expecting Perl, given the name.
Oh, Sean and Jeff. But for back ups, OK, right?
Holding an opposing view doesn't mean that they lack moral integrity.
At the bottom: "Last updated August 7, 2017"

Wonder what changed today?
Adderall XR and Metformin actually are better than the generic.
Maybe there's a relevant post in the archives of askamanager.com? Also aren't there many other white men around you that you could ask for advice?
> B isn't the argument being made by diversity advocates

Of course it isn't because then it would expose the hypocrisy of what they advocate. It's white-knighting at its finest.

> Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.

I agree there is sexism in tech, both overt and casual that discourages women from entering tech and/or causes them to leave. The question is, does increasing diversity actually fix this problem?

The author of the memo specifically addresses this, and states that the focus should be on providing psychological safety for people of all groups, rather than forced diversity that may not end up addressing the problem.
James Damore Has Been Fired
Yes, and in fact this is what the original author was claiming (that non-diverse candidates had a higher false-negative rate)

However, if the number of hires is kept constant, and a given process is claimed to be flawed, then you are implicitly stating that one or more offers should have gone to what was a non-hire instead of what was a hire.
Brendan's situation was very different - he's a public figure and you no longer belong to yourself at that point.
You argument would suggest this:

If an organization does, at any time, use hiring priorities besides work ability, and thus hires people whose work ability was not as good as it could be - from henceforth on, nobody can ever criticize those hiring policies, because that would imply criticizing the people hired under those policies.

>Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team

Funny, lots of people I've worked with have alienated me, and others, and various groups of people (different teams, specialties, ages, men, conservatives, etc). We somehow still manage to keep functioning in the same building. You, with bigotry of low expectations, seem to think women don't have the maturity for that.
McAfee Goes to China for ‘Shape the Future’ Global Summit
Interesting question, but I don't think it is symmetrical because of the power dynamic.
Yes? He's admitting he doesn't have the expertise to address that. Evo-psych is definitely not a generally accepted scientific field, so I don't really take issue with his off hand dismissal.
If it is either die or survive without choose survive, obviously.

Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.