skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah that's another problem. People immediately assume the worst as soon as you say something even the least bit supportive of 'the other side'.

Trump tries to get rid of unnecessary regulations

"Guys, I think Trump might actually have a point here..."

"OH MY GOD YOU MUST BE A CLIMATE DENIER!"
If by routine you mean once in the last 50 years. This place just happened to hit 10° hotter than that during the random interval researchers were there to measure it.
This is the strangest rationalization for the firing of a whistleblower I think I've ever heard... Given that Google's hiring practices caused the offense, why should we shoot the messenger?

> Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic

Isn't this how every Inquisition is justified?
> I think it’s really important to discuss this topic scientifically, keeping an open mind and using informed skepticism when evaluating claims about evidence.

> ...

> There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. These include culturally-embedded gender stereotypes, biased socialization practices, in some cultures explicit employment discrimination, and a certain degree of masculinization of technological workplaces.

Well that didn't last long
That's so interesting! And strange!
> (a) excluding minorities is inhumane,

The author didn't propose excluding minorities. He proposed including them more by making the workplace more attractive to them. Nobody's suggesting Google should have a "males only" or "whites only" policy.
Why is that a bad thing to point out?

A startup I once worked for sent out a memo asking that HR be involved before rejecting a "borderline" female candidate. As a generally apolitical junior employee this seemed really concerning -- we had pretty strict hiring standards and from that point on I wondered if each new female employee would have made it if they were born male.

I can't say if Google's practices are discriminatory (I don't really know what they are) but it's a very important thing to have open, honest discussion about. At the time, I kept my mouth shut because I was pretty low on the totem pole. If I were an employee at Google I would now know to do the same.
The truth of what he said has nothing to do with why he was fired. He was fired for not being politically correct and offending people, not because his arguments were right or wrong. People are usually most outraged by statements which are true or close to true but which they do not want to believe.
I agree, it's certainly possible to find scientists who will support one stance or another, but please do read the linked article in its entirety before spreading misinformation. One of the scientists is actually a woman (and non-white btw), Debra Soh, who holds a PhD in sexual neuroscience.
We value diversity of thought. As long as it's been pre-approved by the Thought Police in HR. sorry Google, you can't have it both ways. To those thinking about leaving, trust me, you'll never look back.
My point was, it's not a good set of examples, since they are so unlike each other. Unless you mean certain organizations actually consider them equivalent.
What is the proof for this 'systemic' discrimination favouring white men?

Asians people are over-represented in Silicon Valley, yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people.
try asking how much a procedure is the next time you go to the doctor, you'll get a bunch of blank stares.

That's probably because the people you can ask who fully understand the procedure you need don't know what the prices for you are or everything you're going to need, and the people who know the prices aren't doctors and couldn't determine what exactly the procedure will entail. This is by design, of course, but it means that the people you might try to get a price from aren't able to tell you, even if they really want to.

Take your car to a mechanic, and ask how much a repair is before they look at your car. They can tell you typical costs, but can't tell you what your repair will cost yet. So you let them look the car over, then come back to you with an estimate. But that's still not the final cost, because once they start working something else might come up, and they'll have to stop to talk to you about the additional work. You don't know the final cost until all the work is done. That's the way it is with medical procedures too, except most of the time you can't stop midway through to discuss options and costs when something unexpected happens. The doctor just has to take care of it, and let you know about it afterwards.
The Little Schemer is what made me fully comfortable with recursion. It's an amazing teacher.
Google Fires Writer of Memo Criticizing Diversity Initiatives
> Why spend a dollar if it’ll be worth $2 tomorrow?

Why sell your house right now, when you know land prices are going to increase in the future? Factor in the rate on increase (which is not going to be 100% in a day once the currency stabilizes), and the benefit of holding vs spending isn't that skewed anymore.
They decided he was a witch, and he was burned at the stake. That's it in a nutshell.

They won't much enjoy a world where these new rules they've created might apply to them.
For those asking, this seems to be hosted on App Engine and he's gone over his quota. App Engine's throttling is both a blessing and a curse (presumably he's using the free tier and never noticed this). You'll note that it's explicitly saying he's over quota not that it can't handle it ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
> The implications [...] are toxic.

And therefore it is false?
Don't bother. These are the same people that are mad at alleged quotas being the only reason why they can't go to elite schools (and then saying school doesn't matter afterward).
Employment practices insurance in California is typically triple the rest of the country due to favorable plaintiff laws and loss experience.

Source: reviewed many regulatory actuarial filings, which are public record - mine were in Alaska but you might find the same by trawling thru https://fortress.wa.gov/oic/onlinefilingsearch/ or http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0800-rate-filings/
Clearly scientific training does have at least some credence to scientific arguments.
A recursion is a cycle in the graph of function calls.

Decomposing a problem into functions is something else.
There exist people who think abortion is a murderous violation of certain people's human rights.

There also exist people who think forbidding abortion is a violation of the human rights of the mothers.

There exist people who think that taxing them and using the money to pay for things they find abhorrent (e.g. war) is a violation of their fundamental rights.

There exist people who think that compulsory education is a violation of children's rights.

Should all these people say the following: "These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate", "If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them", "attempts to deny people fair civil rights ... [are] institutionalized violence"? And then feel justified in, say, campaigning to get anyone who disagrees with them fired?

I do agree, by the way, that advocating laws that violate people's rights is not much morally different from doing the violation oneself. As an anarcho-capitalist, I conclude that probably >99% of political discourse consists of people advocating laws that violate people's rights. I sigh, shrug, and try to make a difference in the places where I can.
Assuming you're not a woman or minority, don't be so sure that's what you would prefer (unless you're saying you would prefer there were no bias at all, in which case, duh). There are women and minorities that have benefited from such programs, and absolutely do not feel guilty by it, because they believe that in the absence of those programs, the unfair disadvantage would have exceeded any "unfair advantage" the program gave them.
This: Its about the work environment.

My partner was a female chip designer who after 25 years got out of the business (in start up, saved up for early retirement..) Being an early employee well compensated. She loved her work, but not the environment, which while not outright hostile, wasn't good. She's got thick skin. Its the environment thats keeping women out, not the work. If you don't think your getting a fair shake, you aren't going to stick around.
> There is a very long list of odious things you can claim "science" justifies;

Does the length of such a list invalidate the items in the list? I don't see your point.

> in fact, it's kind of hard to think of something you can't six-degrees-of-science your way to defending.

Just because something is not directly implied by something else, doesn't mean there is no correlation. If you are working on a mathematical proof, would you give up if you cannot reach the end in 6 (or any arbitrary small number) of steps? Would you declare the assertion wrong? If yes, you're just a bad scientist.
If I had a PhD in Computer Science, and I write a 10-page manifesto about biology, should it instantly be believable too?
> There has to be a more charitable explanation than your implied "four scientists don't know how to do science properly" thesis.

Indeed - one of them knows how to.

> Is diversity honestly so narrow a field, that a social psychologist, personality psychologists, evolutionary psychology, and a sexual neuroscientist are in no position to say anything?

Unless they've done any research in it, sure. Why should any of them have more insight into diversity than, say, a nuclear physicist?

The issue isn't whether there are gender-related differences that are relevant to the job. It's not even whether those are significant enough to result in a measurable difference in outcome. It's whether those factors are the primary reason for the observed disparity, and neither the document author or the quoted scientists present any evidence whatsoever that that's the case. Failing to do that means that the conclusions drawn (ie, that existing diversity initiatives discriminate against men while providing no benefit to the company) aren't scientific.
Being fired is a societal sanction, a.k.a a limitation on freedom of expression[0].

Private homes are not sovereign lands and neither are companies.

[0]https://www.article19.org/pages/en/limitations.html
I'm not reading any problem description in your comment other than an inadequate imagination.
As a ML enthusiast, this is incredible to watch!

I'm completely blown away that Google was working on full-scale physical architectures that were optimized for these problems. Talk about being two steps ahead of the game!
Like I said, to solve the consent issue of work, I feel like the "fiscal liberal" would suggest something more in line with free education, universal health care, universal basic income, etc. I don't see why they'd propose to make it illegal.
Yeah that's what I thought until a black friend very kindly and patiently spelt it out and it still took me a while. It's counterintuitive and nominally smart people don't get it - and are much more adept at finding justifications as to why their thoughts are right, and taking down anything which challenges that. 'Honky' doesn't carry the offence of 'nigger' and there's a good reason for that. (I'm white and I don't really care what people call me.)
OK. Without seeing the original thread, that sounds more like breaking the site's code of conduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html has "be civil" and "instead of calling names" right at the start of the section about comment threads. I get angry myself sometimes in arguing with someone here, so I can sympathize.
This doofus didn't write a memo about keeping people of faith out of Google, and he didn't write it at some secret "men's club".

Instead, he had the poor judgement to publish in a workplace forum an argument that the women at Google tended to be there due to reduced standards for hiring women, because biologically women tended to be less suitable for the kind of work they were being hired to do.

Timothy Lister had a term for this kind of thing in _Peopleware_: he called it "teamicidal". If you do something teamicidal at your dev job, you should expect repercussions. You are paid to contribute to a team, not to fuck it up in an effort to remake it in your image.

(I think Google took the easy way out here, by the way, and that there were more productive ways they could have responded to this, rather than let it fester for days until they were cornered into a dramatic response. But: I don't work at Google, and my epistemological certainty about this is somewhat low.)
A slight correction: Yonatan wasn't in Human Resources, he was a very senior and well-respected long-time software engineer and architect.
"They said they didn't cover the generic, and I said well do you cover the name brand one? They said they did, but they couldn't give it to me because my doctor had ordered the generic. If I ordered the name brand, it would be $100 for a 90 day supply, which is a huge difference."

3 possibilities:

1. Your doctor wrote "dispense as written" on the script, which barred United from substituting. This is highly unlikely because doctors only do this when prescribing name brand.

2. United didn't have system rules in place to flag this type of thing because there's no financial incentive to do so for United or your employer who is actually paying for your drug. Chances are, if generic costs $347, then brand name costs more. When you pay $100, your employer is still paying the remaining, which could be $250+ When you get generic, your employer pays nothing.

3. United didn't have system rules in place to flag this because they are just incompetent. The fact that they don't cover generic means that your employer is getting rebate from brand. Unless your employer is trying to save a few bucks by intentionally screwing over their employee, United system should've flagged this an simply auto substituted to cheaper alternative.

Either way, unless brand was materially different, United is within legal right to auto substitute without needing a new scripts. In short, they served you a bunch of turd sandwiches.
There is another:

c) Human beings are poor judges of merit due to cognitive bias, poor intuition for statistics, prejudices based on emotional reactions to irrelevant past experiences, and perverse incentives. It is therefore justifiable to apply a post correction.

I'm a bit surprised that techies don't see this as obvious. How often do inferior products win due to superior marketing that plays on these biases?

I am also surprised programmers have such confidence in absolute meritocracy in code shops given that every coder knows how hard it can be to evaluate the performance of coders on a team. Let's say one coder closes tons of tickets but does shoddy work while another works more slowly and creates things of beauty. The former often looks better but the latter might be the real MVP. I've seen coders who add little code but are indispensable on a team due to things like deep domain knowledge, great judgement, spooky horse whisperer debugging skills, etc.

Yet suddenly some are convinced of the infallibility of our ideas of merit as soon as someone tosses a culture war grenade in the room.

I don't even want to bring up the softness of some of the areas of science cited by that manifesto or the reproducibility crisis they've had but... Oops I just did.

Personally I am on the fence about diversity measures such as the ones I've heard exist at Google for practical reasons. I am not convinced they work very well and as an engineer I prefer things that work. My sentiment is on their side though, and I have become deeply repelled by the opposing movement (now generally called the alt-right) ever since it unmasked itself. Head over to alt-right subs on Reddit or worse Voat if you want to see what they really stand for. So if I were forced to pick a side I would begrudgingly pick the diversity nazis over the actual Nazis.
Ask HN: How can I productize my app development services?
Is there a way to package my freelance app development services into a productized service? One with clear, predefined delivarables?
The correct response is:

"As a company we do not agree with X's opinion on the assessment of the work environment or our diversity practices. Any further queries on the matter should be directed at X."

As other has mentioned, it's very likely X will take legal action against Google because what they've done is very reasonably arguably illegal.
Pity we will never see a genuine version of uTorrent that will support it. That was a real loss.
> Whether that results in effective outcomes for the business is a different matter

No, this is the topic that is being debated in this chain and "It's self evident that it's working" is not sufficient to refute the point.
Which is, of course, not what he said.
> Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them. Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them.

And this position is exactly what causes sane people to say "Left is embracing insanity. I do not like those I affiliate with embracing insanity. I guess I'm just going to avoid participating"
These people are state and federal legislators. They are making laws based on their bigotry.
Occam's razor is so commonly misused and abused. It seems to be more often used to support whatever pet theory someone has rather than as an impartial tool.
He argues that Google should end diversity programs.

Not really, he suggests replacing them with other diversity programs that he claims (whether correctly or incorrectly) would work better.

In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document.

Yes. He forgot his place and and committed heresy against the party line. That's always a dumb thing to attach your real name to.

Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.

That's an interesting argument, that people's feelings should have precedence over seeking truth.

it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right"

It reads like he did try to be careful to the best of his ability; it's just that in such a hostile environment, not even professionals have sufficient ability.
For programming and technical tasks, there are objective ways to measure accuracy, correctness and performance of code that don't require any consideration of someone's race, gender or sexuality.
> Scientific merit should be the only consideration

More likely value to shareholders, in his setting.
If this makes sense to you, you haven't actually talked to women in this field who trust you.

Scott has a bad habit of setting up bad strawmen and doing literature reviews without talking to domain experts.

(Frankly the weakness of the arguments he's choosing to debunk make me doubt that he even engaged in this topic with good faith. If you think the opposing view point is summarized by ' "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!” ', then you're not serious about this conversation.)
I agree. It's a job, you're there to work. A workplace isn't a venue to stand on your personal soapbox and air your opinions, be disruptive and waste company time.
If your self-report chess score correlates with chess winrate, you'd admit it's meaningful.

It's same for Big Five. Self-reported neuroticism correlates with, say, diagnosis of depression. It's not just perception because it correlates with outcomes of interest.
I don't know what is the IQ of an average programmer, for my claim it's enough to state that it is over the average of the population. 130 was just a number, it doesn't really matter anyway ( for my claim ).
I think it means that this implementation of homomorphic encryption relies on polynomial computations being done on the plane of a geometrical torus? See the relevant paper here:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/870.pdf

Someone with more background could probably expand on that.
In a world where qualified diverse candidates still regularly get rejected at greater rates than qualified non-diverse candidates, is this bad? I mean, as soon as the needle even flirts with going past perfectly fair in the other direction, that's when some of these people get up in arms?
Seems like Google introduced the problems, he merely exposed them.
>>This is the closing of the American mind.

This isn't just in America. This is happening all over the world.

Right wing politics is now the only refuge for people who want to speak their mind.

As much as scary this is, this is the truth.
The big secret is that bio-equivalent and generic drugs sometimes aren't effective!

http://cmlnetwork.ca/generic-imatinib-is-it-really-the-same/

http://cml-iq.com/generic-gleevec-is-the-same-the-same/

Frustrating that the article doesn't point that out. These new formulas do not need to prove they work, they just have to prove that their active ingredient is the same after the patent expires.
I'm layman but am biased against it being true as it is not as fun and exotic as many worlds, regardless of merit.
The probability of an event depends on your knowledge. Whether something is deterministic is a question of probability. Hence whether something is deterministic can depend on your knowledge. If the universe is deterministic to its simulator but random to us, I would call it random. Besides this difference in terminology, I think we agree.
TensorFlow stars on GitHub by user profiles' public location
I'll eat my hat if they fired everyone who posted "I'm With Her" on the internal G+ back in November
Women have graduated computer science at a less than 20% rate (which is the ratio of women in tech at Google) for more that a decade. Why?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
Catastrophically how?

Society also lacks "provisions" for violent criminals[0] but it still handles them and is yet to fail catastrophically.

[0] I'm not equating these two categories of people, merely illustrating that your example of comparing software exceptions to people is deeply flawed.
Currently on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952787
For the most part, generic drugs are cheap. It's patented drugs and out of patent drugs with only 1 producer that have high costs. Widely used drugs that aren't protected by a patent are pretty inexpensive.
Mirror: https://archive.is/VlNfl
I think he's being fired more for the severe PR fallout that resulted in the way he tried to start the conversation, than for the content of the manifesto.
Who's tradition are you using for that society argument?

It sounds like a facile reading of Mills, without ever going to the back half where he talks about valid reasons for a society to put pressure on an individual, but I've been more on the Federalist papers this year for obvious reasons.
genetics is complicated. not only is there so called junk dna, there is also epi-genetics. and even the genes that we correlate with certain diseases are not understood well. we dont understand how our dna translates into our physiology. and at no point have i pretended to understand this.