skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer.

Why is it always scorched-earth and never something like retraining? You bemoan hostile environments, but then demand termination if a foot is ever put wrong.
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https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+studies+site%3Aedu
Communes exist, and people start them regularly. Unfortunately, they tend to be unstable and disintegrate. The most famous one is probably San Francisco's "Summer of Love" in 1967. It lasted just a few months.
I don't have a pile of references at hand since this isn't my area of study, but here's what I was able to google up:

1. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf This study was primarily aimed at identifying the impact of race, but incidentally showed that resumes with females names received a lower number of callbacks, in addition to the race based effect.

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ "Without provision of information about candidates other than their appearance, men are twice more likely to be hired for a mathematical task than women."

3. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract "Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant."

4. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5... "the authors show that [anonymous application procedure] increased the chances of both women and individuals of non-Western origin of advancing to the interview stage."

5. http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 Anonymization in orchestra additions (blind screening) led to women advancing out of preliminary rounds 50% more often.
These things don't happen on accident. Somebody has to take charge, and whoever does is likely to want a disproportionate amount of power and wealth for doing so. And then they just set up a traditional business.
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I very much agree with this theory. The problem is that fire does not respect the anthropocene. We have changed the wilderness in nontrivial ways (e.g. forestry). Fuel is far more abundant and dense.

Every species (including plants) on the planet evolved to deal with a certain amount of fire - including the appropriate degree of propagation. We've unavoidably upset that balance and so a radically different solution is required. Although I don't know what that solution is, it looks nothing like what we are doing today.
> "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group."

"But beware of this particular subgroup, because they are biologically inclined to not be as interested or good in the subject."

> Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought

No, people are pissed that it's 2017 and people are still trying to make an argument for the superiority of testosterone as a predictor for success in a particular field. Can't we just give everyone a chance, instead of trying to pigeonhole them right away?

> 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.

Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.

> This is the closing of the American mind.

The closing of the American mind started happening when a political party decided to take over religion and anti-intellectualism as their platform. That's why we've gotten to the point where being called an "expert" is paramount to an insult in certain contexts.
> Founding a business requires considerable access to capital.

Not necessarily, especially not with software.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donna-ballman/can-you-be-fired...

I think this comes down to is affirmative action policy a workplace condition. Discussion about workplace conditions is separate from discrimination law entirely so 'protected class' becomes a red herring here. I'm not sure this is the best article but I tried to find something from a left leaning source I find reasonably fair given that this seems to be an anti-right topic.
This is a straw-man argument, the point is that if women are predisposed to be less interested in a profession than maybe that explains why there are less woman in that profession. Also the memo is about evaluating everyone based on their merits, not sure how you got the idea that it was for discriminating against women.
There are a lot of holes in the arguments you're laying out, but I'll comment on just a few:

* Google is a profit-motivated entity. They have to act in the interest of their shareholders. Correcting for historical imbalances - to the extent that it negatively perverts hiring standards - doesn't factor into the calculus of a responsible corporation.

* Jews were systematically exterminated in a historical event that was even more recent than slavery. Countless more were left destitute. Why are they any less deserving of positive bias?

* There are millions of White people across the Midwest who are dirt poor because manufacturing is no longer a meaningful economic sector in this country. What about them?

And more generally, believing that there's a contemporary responsibility to correct for historical imbalances leads you down a fantastically absurd rabbit hole. We should instead be addressing the present socioeconomic condition (which will indirectly benefit many of the historically disenfranchised). And that is the job of government. Not corporations.
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> When I'm alone, I don't stutter at all if

From a sample of N=2, I can say that's pretty typical ;-)

But to be serious, I don't think that's uncommon.

> I didn't stutter when I was kid until I played with a neighbor kid who did,

Ah interesting. That reminded me that my cousin also stutters and well when we played together, we both got worse after a while. My parents noticed that. I also noticed after I watched or listen some stutter, I'd stutter more. I wonder if that that's why I never really wanted that Kings' Speech movie. I think I maybe be unconsciously afraid of picking it up...

Oh and I also speak other languages too, and have wondered if it that made it worse. That is having to learn two at the same time when I was a child.
That's not how it works. Google can fire him for no reason, and arguing with a company's policies on a mailing list is a pretty good reason to fire. Like, it's perfectly legit for a company to say shut up and get with the pogrom. Even if he's fired for saying stuff that is true. Edit: However, there might be specific technical reasons it's an illegal firing outlined in other posts in this thread. IANAL
Slightly related to this is a Stephen King's FAQ Question [1].

> Will you read my manuscript and tell me what you think?

....
"There's another reason, and that's a legal one. I've been sued for plagiarism 8 or 9 times. Any writer who has deep pockets has been sued for plagiarism from time-to-time-that goes for J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, really everyone. For everyone who publishes best-selling fiction, somebody wants to think, 'Oh, he got that idea from me' and so it's just much easier and much safer to say I never read that book at all".

I mean, out of hundreds of applications that they received, one idea slightly matching with what they were already doing is highly probable. It seems rather unlikely that a company leader would see an application and jump out of his seat to instruct his team to copy the idea without any credit.

[1]: http://stephenking.com/faq.html
Thank you for your helpful and informative comment, I appreciate it.
New Scientist ran a story[1] in 2000, covering Bryan Roberts - a professor an engineer at the University of Western Sydney in Australia - and his plan to build 'gyromills' that used wind power to stay airborne, generated electricity, and transferred that back to ground with a tether. He'd built his first proof of concept device in 1986.

Hadn't heard much about it since, but am reminded of the proposal every time someone comes up with a comparable design -- to generate electricity at high altitude, where where winds are consistent and strong, and property prices are low -- using some lighter than air or self-propelled vehicle.

I see the gyromill plan has since morphed into a company SkyWindPower[2] and appears to look more like a 4-prop drone now, coincidentally.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16722574-800-reach-fo...

[2] http://www.skywindpower.com/
What do you mean by diverse? Gender? Skin color? Or actually bringing new perspectives and opinions?

Diversity in tech has essentially become people who look different but think the same way.
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I loved the sound and light weight of the Etymotics, but found they were very fragile. Then I found the Shure m315, and never looked back.

Well, that is until I got an iPhone 7+, which doesn't have a headphone jack. I hate, loathe, and despise Bluetooth audio, but I can't live without my battery case, and headphones don't work over micro USB.

So, Bose QC35s it is. At least they've got the best ANC I've ever had, and the Bluetooth audio is slightly less horrible than anything else I've tried.

Sigh.....
> not get canned

Or sued, seems like this would be an easy basis for a hostile work suit. Couple promotion denials, a documented complaint and this manifesto would probably be an easy lawsuit, though INAL.
I don't think that's what he was saying. His point was if we have equality of opportunity, meaning that interviews/applications are completely blind (this is impossible to do 100% in practice) and "fair", what would we expect the application and hire rate of men vs women to be? Is it 50/50? Or might it be different distributions for different jobs depending partially on biological predisposition to certain interests? If there are less women and more men interested in that type of role, then that could be partially due to biological predisposition to wanting that type of job.

This is not at all to say that, as the person in charge of hiring, you should be concerned about these things. You should set objective standards for what you need in a particular role and hire the individuals that best meet those standards.

That being said, there is ample evidence that most of the disparity in tech in hiring is due to cultural/social factors and focusing on biological aspects is mostly a waste of time. I think a lot of the diversity-increasing efforts in place at companies such as Google are commendable and should be continued.
Q: How many employees felt free to discuss their support for Hillary openly (I'm sure Bernie was in a minority)? How many people felt free to discuss their support for Trump (or even any other republican? I'm sure there were a few supporters here and there but I bet the great majority assumed everyone _should_ support Hillary.

People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
This is similar to something Jordan Peterson has argued [1].

In short: Societies which afford economic rights to women have flourished, but women pay a huge price for it. The question shouldn't be "why aren't more women in positions of power", but really "why are there any men who are insane enough to occupy those positions" when social science has already proven that money beyond a certain number doesn't make you happier and the work conditions are absolutely atrocious.

Women are much more sane than men, and anyone who argues that we should have more women in power is arguing that women, as a class, should be terminally unhappy. Which isn't to say that the same opportunities shouldn't exist, and in many fields they don't, but be careful when conflating opportunity and outcome.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUtDdlNGwY
Thanks I haven't hear of that. And it is written in C++ which is nice.

Is it considered the spiritual successor to the original uTorrent?
I tried the Comply tips. I hated, loathed, and despised them.

I found the triple-flange silicone tips worked much better for me.

YMMV, etc.....
Your gender and skin color effect your chance of being hired at Google, and that is racist and sexist.
Some dung beetles have taken to decapitating millipedes
You can't be let go for being a whistleblower or someone who wants to improve hiring practices. The author has grounds for a lawsuit and was likely fired illegally.
It most certainly is.

Your information is out of date. Being transgender itself is no longer considered a mental disorder. Gender dysphoria, discomfort and dysfunction caused by society and by being in the wrong body is the diagnosable condition. Once transgender people have been treated, there isn't any more dysphoria and there is no disorder.
Incidentally, Professor Fouad has follow-up studies:

- NSFGears: why men leave

- NSF ENGAGE: why men and women stay

Should be interesting, but I haven't seen any published results yet.

https://uwm.edu/education/people/fouad-nadya/
> the biological factors make a meaningful difference in engineering feels like arguing for vim or emacs makes for a better engineer

the author wasn't suggesting they make better engineers, just that they make different career choices than pursuing engineering
Sounds like a common case of loving the idea of something but not having the will to carry it out. That's most of humanity in my experience. People, even experienced tech professionals are far more likely to bitch about a problem vs actually taking steps to solve it.

It's like people who will bitch about how lousy customer service is at company X, but if company X raised the prices on their products by $1-2 to hire full time customer support staff, those same people would take their business elsewhere. So really they don't want better customer support, they just want the genie to grant wishes.

3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem fits pretty well with my life experience. :P
Closing the thread to new accounts seems kind of sad, controversial topics like this lend themselves to throwaway accounts from active members of the community. Maybe the solution is some feature for anonymization from active accounts only, but it feels like we ought to find something better than forcing people to comment under an account that's generally linkable to a name.
I agree. It is a venue for the personal soapbox and airing of opinions of the CEO.
> Is that fundamental randomness or not?

I would say, not. There's no actual randomness from an objective point of view, it's just a lacking in your understanding of things.

I think that map/territory confusions are the source of so many problems and should be rigourously avoided. I think it would be a map/territory confusion to consider it a kind of actual randomness.
It is a little bit symmetrical though because white males are occasionally told they have had everything handed to them and they do find that infuriating to hear.
I think the author made the mistake of using psychosocial nomenclature, like the big 5 personality traits[1]. Without spending more time explaining the language he was using.

I think people will respond negativity to being told that their group is more likely to be high in Neuroticism. Among other things.

It seems clear to me that his memo was heavily inspired by Jordan Peterson, and to a reader without some basic introduction to psychology the assertions he make can seem inflammatory.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
> 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.

Your argument is confusing your very personal emotional cultural and racial feelings with what you assume to be the experience of other American citizens, this is a false presumption. You are further assuming that these feeling supersede Our legal framework and constitutional rights.

> "beneficiaries of our forefathers"

For my self and I can attest for most of my social circle neither George Washington or any of the colonial American founders or 18th and 19th century Americans are my 'forfathers'. The are the founders of America and I am legally an American citizen but I have no cultural or hereditary connection to any of these men or America previous to my families very recent immigration to this country.

"we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes"

Again there is no 'work' that I or any other American citizen is legally obligate to do to as you say to 'clean up there mess'. On a general note one of the key freedoms that we enjoy in the modern democratic state that separates us from feudalism is the abolition of intergenerational debt. And again there is no intergenerational relationship between myself and any historic American hereditary.

Do you think that a Ukrainian immigrant who immigrates to this Country in 2017 should be denied employment to give the job to an Ethiopian immigrant who immigrates here in 2017 also to 'finish the work' of 18th century English American who farmed potatoes there whole life and probably never even saw a an African let alone owned any land or slaves?

Quite frankly its a bizarre and brutish sort of racial totalitarianism that is being put forward by American liberals to deny opportunity to broad brush of people they have chosen to discriminate agaist.

Should a Chinese immigrant who works as a dishwasher be denied a spot at Harvard to make room for a Black American who comes from a Millionaire sport star family so that an arbitrary quota is filled?

These historical grievances are alien to an increasing percentage of the American public who has no racial or historical connection to any of these issues. And we are certainly no going to forsake out future wealth and prosperity and the opportunities of out children to 'make happy' a small wealthy group of mostly white Americans who think they have the right to discriminate against us for 'good reasons'.
Contrary to what you believe, there is no contradiction here. Implicit association test and stereotype threat (to name two large offenders) had reproducibility crisis. IQ and Big Five findings replicated a lot and basically have no reproducibility problem.
No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.
The difference in effectiveness comes from differences in manufacturing. Drug manufacturers typically don't test the effects of drug manufacturing on performance. Because of this, generics can sometimes perform worse.

But, it seems likely that this effect could lead them to sometimes perform better as well.
I think the quinessential example of this is reminding people about their bias against minorities. Several studies have shown this drastically reduces false negatives and raises false positives to a level that is no higher than the false positive rate in the non-minority population. This isn't enough to say the false positive rate doesn't raise, but it's more than enough to say increasing false positives doesn't imply unqualified.
> because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad points, good arguments, lousy arguments, misrepresentations of others' views, and unstated implications.

Is this really an honest assessment? I haven't yet seen a single reply to the manifesto that addresses its points and counters the supposedly "lousy arguments" in a neutral tone and objective manner. Please point me to one if you have...
It can't fire you for being a whistleblower.
> Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say.

> 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.

Please provide examples. Your statement is incorrect. Looks like you didn't bother to listen correctly to what he said.
Kindly note, none of what I'm saying justifies Nazism.

There was quite a bit of PC. Germany was paying huge war reparations to France and UK. It was sort of portrayed as 'atonement of sins'. Economy was in tatters. There was insane levels of humiliation dumped on German populace for losing WW1. People were expected to simply eat it up as moral punishment.

None of this justifies WW2 or Nazism of course.
But they didn't fire him for no reason. They fired him for a reason, but not a reason you typically fire someone for. Ergo either big severance + NDA or forthcoming lawsuit.
I was probably first exposed to the concept of sexual harassment as a teenager, just before college. Clinton had just diddle an intern. Clarence Thomas was accused of it while he was up for Supreme Court confirmation. I remember a lot of apologia, "he got his signals crossed" or something like that. And that was my impression going forward.

The "honest mistake" trope is not sexual harassment. Now that I know more about how the world works, that story was clearly a PR push to de-legitimize the complaints of both the particular people accusing these public figures at the time, and anyone who might try in the future.

I very soon had a fast primer on what is real sexual harassment. One coworker at my first job out of college was constantly haranguing another. Overt sexual advances that were always met with "that's just <him>. It's just a joke." It made me uncomfortable just to watch it. I know it made her uncomfortable because she would lock herself in her office and cry at least once a week. I don't know why she confided in me about it. I begged her to file a complaint. She was probably right that it would do more harm than good. I complained to my own boss and got told I was too young to understand. I suppose I was too young to understand, but only because I had not yet reached the point where I rejected any authority figures who told me shit like "you're too young to understand" at 22 years old.

The guy did this in the open, during project status meetings. This wasn't Uber or UploadVR or whatever other Silicon Valley brogrammer startup we're going to tsk-tsk "boys will be boys" and never actually do anything about. This was an established engineering firm, with a very strictly worded employee handbook, and an HR director that literally looked the other way.

So I don't want to hear anything about it not being systemic.

I've personally never found sexual talk of any nature in the office to be comfortable. I've had gay bosses hit on me. I've had straight bosses "jokingly" touch me inappropriately. I've had female bosses make jokes about my love life. Sat by while coworkers traded stories about sexual conquests. Even if the sexual advances are towards someone else, if they make you uncomfortable, it's still sexual harassment.

But we've had this trope that it's some sort of attack on lonely men who take a risk on finding love. And I think that active misdirection has not only (obviously) harmed so many women, it's harmed quite a few men, too. Probably most of us, in some way.

It's not "getting along with a woman at work and ask her out and she rejects you." It's about creating a hostile work environment. Anyone who can't tell the difference has got a serious problem. You do not have to put up with being made to feel uncomfortable like that at work.