skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably rhetorical, but I can take a stab at an answer! This story is interesting to me, personally, because I'm now just a little bit less naive about how things work around here. The Brendan Eich fiasco startled me a bit, but didn't really register long-term. However, I'm now starting to realize that my worldview, my political beliefs, and my faith will likely be important factors (read: challenges!) in the evolution of my career over the course of the next 20 or 30 years -- something that I had never seriously considered previously, since I'm just a software developer. Interesting times!
It's not clear to me what you're saying. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, "redneck" isn't a racial group.

No-one is arguing that class-based discrimination doesn't exist, as it certainly does.
It's two words in a double-triple negative. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.
If you are talented enough Google will scout and hire you regardless of race or gender. Anything less is someone complaining about life not being fair.
No, they really wouldn't, not nearly with the same frequency.

Trump inspires a special "rules no longer apply" insanity in far-leftists. They enjoy feeling like the normal rules of conduct don't apply, so they lean into it.
There is certainly an authoritarian left trying to form in the u.s. They have formed elsewhere, e.g. Eastern Europe : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967067X11...
I won't dispute the possibility of the scenario you describe, but the memo being discussed doesn't really fit this at all. The policies and programs he objected to are largely (if not entirely) things like mentoring programs and techniques for making the hiring pool more diverse.

There can certainly be a blurry line in some places that makes it difficult to identify whether a given program has an (unintentional or otherwise) discriminatory effect but a lot of the stuff he objected to is very clearly positive assistance for people who need it, and not anything that harms men in his position.
we have laws that govern employment and we don't have laws that govern friendship. these two relationships are not morally or legally equivalent.
And why is that wrong? Worrying about your company's hiring bar is a very normal thing. HR should have contacted him to explain how they balance the desire for diversity and the desire for hiring the best candidates. There's no need for a public execution.
> We have a culture of anti-intellectualism and dogmatism around certain topics that for whatever reason are considered sacred and not allowed to be challenged (ie. political correctness), and its disgraceful.

From a personal perspective I get where you are coming from, but from a professional perspective it makes no sense. There are ways to present opposing viewpoints in a workplace without offending half of the people who work there.
Sure, I agree that if your goal is to get married and settle down quickly then NYC might not be ideal.

That certainly doesn't mean everyone finds the NYC dating scene bad. Plenty of people are at a stage in life where their preference is for shorter term relationships and I don't see anything wrong with that.
It gave me the dream to work remotely from abroad. I'm relatively poor and working a lot, but almost 2 years in Japan now.
Thanks for this, having to go into dev tools was driving me a bit crazy even though it's not that hard.
This is where I don't know about Google's diversity aims in detail. The manifesto author regularly talked about 50/50, but I don't know if that is actually Google's stated goal. Regardless, even if an organization aims for 50/50, that is not the underlying objective - it's more a diagnosis to meet the real underlying objective, which is to have a hiring practice that is not subject to hidden gender biases (or seeks to make up for them in some way).
Google is not a government, so your point is moot.

The source you provide, which is just an opinion, talks only about governments.

Citing your own source:

"The right to freedom of expression cannot be limited at the whim of a public official"
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.

At colleges, lowering the bar is in fact how they have often been implemented. This article has some decent numbers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...

Lowering the bar is also the easiest way for a mid-level manager to achieve a target percentage. It's probably also the first method that may come to mind for many people.

Also, if you spend 3x the resources to find 3x the number of candidates (is it linear? I dunno), conduct normal interview processes, and then randomly throw out 2/3 of the male candidates that passed, while keeping all the women that passed, that is one way to triple the number of women you hire while having the same bar for men and women. However, the step where you throw out a random 2/3 of the male candidates might strike someone as highly irrational. Why not throw out the bottom 2/3 of male candidates? But then you end up with male candidates that passed a higher bar. You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate. But it would probably be difficult to convince the people involved that avoiding the "unfortunate" outcome is worth throwing away 2/3 of the very best male candidates.

It might be possible to spend 3x the resources in such a way that all the new candidates you find are women. That would be a way to avoid the above problems. How would this be accomplished? Perhaps you send a recruiter to a university, and have them only talk to the female students. Hmm, that might be a little weird. How about a female-only university? That would be great. Likewise any female-only programming meetup groups. And of course any qualified female engineers that anyone knows—they'll never be wanting for a job.

How well will a company perform that spends significant resources recruiting from female-only groups, compared to one that recruits from groups that simply take the best candidates? How significant a fraction of company resources are normally spent on recruiting? And I did see a study indicating that demographic diversity (measured as age and sex) improved morale. I guess we'll see.

What would really help is if universities published the CS accomplishments of all their female students, but not of their male students. I wonder if they'd be willing to do it.

In any case, my original point was, even if a company does in fact implement its diversity program with one of the methods that does not systematically lead to higher-quality male hires than female hires, I think it is natural for someone to assume until proven otherwise that it is implemented by shifting the bar.
GP's paste of the relevant section includes the claim at the bottom. That is, the fired employee made that claim, not GP.
You don't fix a problem by firing the guy who reports it. It's hardly an SJW conspiracy, pretty much every company in the industry has some variation of the practices he outlines...
Implementing Inverse Kinematics
And apparently the laws of employment in CA allow for you to fire someone you don't like, as long as it isn't for a few particular reasons.

A company can, for example, fire you for not liking the color red.
> Isn't this how every Inquisition is justified?

A private company firing someone over their views is a long, long way from an Inquisition. Your right to say and believe things is not a right for continued employment. The same libertarian argument that you seem to be making has been made the other way many times -- that companies should never be compelled to retain an employee for any reason.
And you just (mostly) summarized it with a single sentence. The fact that such a screed was written at all is a problem. These kinds of arguments require very precise language in order to minimize misunderstandings and deflections.
Zunger believes that asking publicly "are people get hired because of their gender" is toxic and harmful, while asking "are people get paid more because of their gender" is not. This kind of thinking is skewed and biased.
No matter how you feel about what the engineer said, today is a dark day for freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

And before you reply saying that people don't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech at work, consider that the engineer wouldn't have been fired if he had written a memo extolling Google's diversity practices.

He wasn't fired because because he was speaking his mind, he was fired because he said something that some people didn't agree with.
While I don't agree with a lot of premises of the manifesto, I can't shake off a feeling that I just witnessed something very close to a real witch hunt.
Stupid people are everywhere. I want to think that there is a big amount of people that is not like that.

As a male I was told something similar in an interview at Google: if I would mind to work in a company where most people are men? And as the girl you cite I found the question stupid. I have worked in tech I already know how is this.

Instead of diversity program to hire women we should create tolerance programs for everybody.
It's funny how one day Hacker News has a scathing discussion on The Crisis of Reproducibility in Psychology, and the next, it's commenters will fight to the death to defend it.
This can be useful for testing - especially before one could safely assume SNI support - but also for setting up various Web (or other network) servers locally - with an entry in /etc/hosts (so dev-local can point to some other local ip than test-local) etc.
To help, since you look to be somewhat new, the downvotes aren't just because this is place a bastion of liberal Democrat support, but because you didn't really contribute with your comment.

Make an actual argument with references to back it up and you'll likely still get argument, but not necesarrily downvotes.
> Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable?

I think that's it. There's nothing stopping us from making such corps. I'm sure it must have been tried multiple times in history. The fact that no successful company like this exists probably means the concept is unviable.

As to why, that's anyone's guess. Maybe any org without a single-minded purpose is doomed to fail. Maybe if our arms and legs had a say in what we do, we wouldn't survive. Maybe that's the reason millions of years of evolution has turned out a body with a single organ controlling everything else.
I respectfully disagree with your opinion here, as their official platform and statements also contain many things that a typical american might describe as bigoted or harmful. This single article (near the top of the search results for 'gop platform transgender' just to pick one) contains quite a few real examples:

http://www.hrc.org/blog/republican-national-convention-2016-...

Furthermore, the bigotry and discrimination in the GOP platform is well supported by the actual conduct of republican lawmakers in the house and senate.

An individual's right to hold their own opinions on these matters - regardless of how much I might agree with them - is one matter, but it's intellectually dishonest to pretend nothing objectionable is a part of the modern GOP platform. I say this as someone who voted GOP in the past.
> no one thinks this guy is brave.

I do. Well, brave or stupid.

And I'm far from a GOP voter.

Which human rights specifically do you believe he was attempting to debate?

EDIT: Actually, probably both brave and stupid.
Interesting. I had not thought of that. You're likely right.
Here is Dr. Louanne Brizendine explaining the differences between the female and male brains at Google:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu_uGr1ZOn4
There IS censorship at colleges, and emotional grievances ARE being prioritised over logic and facts. You can dislike Ben Shapiro, you can have a lot of valid criticism of breitbart but It's all just Ad Hominems. Good luck with those.
How does a study about affirmative action policies in college admissions offer any specific evidence about Google's policies?
I think we are circling the drain of the right approach to this problem.

If Google's pool of qualified candidates were a "proper" mix of diversity, then I don't think they would need to have the practices outlined in the manifesto.

So encouraging women to get into STEM and to facilitate pulling talent from around the globe to get them into the pool of candidates is 100% the right move to address the diversity issue.

BUT, if women don't come in the numbers you need them to and your international outreach yields mostly asians... what do you do?
> 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.

From the article:

> Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance

A brand of religion with its own sheriff no less.

Who seriously believe you have freedom of speech and thought in such a monocultural place?
The problem with the argument that "people should be treated equally regardless of other factors" is that we have a long. deep history of that not being the case.

We have numerous studies which how simple biasing factors, such as a person's name, can dramatically decrease interview rates.

Arguing against diversity policies can be coached in the language of equality, but the objective results show that the outcomes would not be.

The outrage, fairly or unfairly (it is impossible to know what's in a person's heart) comes from many readers believing that the person is not arguing for equality, but coaching an argument against it's outcome in language that assumes that goal.

For many people, they see a cheap rhetorical trick made in bad faith.
I never said the author's positions were mild or plausible, or that biology explains what happened to women in CS in the US.
It may have been illegal to fire him, see this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
I agree hugely with your first paragraph. Debates like this are fraught with toxicity anyway, but once factionalism ("the left claims that.." and so on) gets mixed in any hope of constructive debate goes out the window. The argument ceases to be about ideas, and becomes a my-team-vs-your-team conflict.

(Worse, this then attracts the worst kind of attention from the internet as culture warriors join the fray, regardless of whether they're interested in what the debate was ostensibly about.)

Whether this takes the screed into firing territory I have no opinion on, but I definitely think that the guy's left/right posturing served to preclude any productive debate that he might have inspired.
I agree you shouldn't call people bigots for association to a given political party, but lets not white wash the GOP's platform:

- Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law

The implication here being that letting gay people get married is going to erode our foundation as a free society and obliterate all of our values as a culture. There are plenty of other callouts in that document to homophobic non-sense.
I think you would agree that your example is different in both scope and visibility than my (extreme) hypothetical examples, and the real example of this manifesto. Plenty of Google employees have expressed opinions similar to Mr. Damore's on memegen or G+ without being terminated.
haha yeah, apparently acknowledging facts about average differences makes one a racists/bigot/asshole.

my guess is that most people have a hard time distinguishing that statements about a population distribution do not mean an endorsement stereotyping.
> These people are not liberals; they are leftists

So Google Corporate HR has gone socialist, then? Or perhaps they've adopted anarcho-syndicalism?

I eagerly await the next Google Doodle featuring Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist uprising.
That just drives down the price of borrowing money until a borrower is found and the market clears. You could just as well place the blame on aging savers driving the price of borrowing down until taking on massive amounts of debt to get ahead in life through college looked reasonable.
Try to.
It's a long document, but reading his tldr he makes claims that I've rarely heard reasonable people make. Notably:

The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology. ○ Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression ○ Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression

I've never heard that all disparities are due to oppression before. I think the problem is that we don't know how much of the gap is due to oppression. There are studies that indicate that there are factors in our society that do oppress the achievement of girls in math/science. How do we figure out how to clear up these issues?

And honestly, as someone who works in tech, I can honestly say that anecdotally I've encountered a LOT of sexist men in the field. I can't say it is the majority, but it is not a small minority. While I can't say with any certainty how much their biases impact the achievement of women in the field, I think most people outside of tech would be surprised at how much bias there is (because it is viewed as so much of a meritocracy).

And then his other point about discriminating to fix the oppression simply is naïve and ignores the day to day discrimination that happens against most oppressed groups on a daily basis. I get that a better solution would be for there to be no more discrimination across the board -- we are all born into a world where discrimination is gone (and past fruits of discrimination disappear too), but that isn't going to happen. Sometimes the choices we have in front of us are the lesser of two evils -- and yes, looking at an evil always looks bad -- but I guarantee you that the author of this article would never trade his life in for the roll of the dice of being born a black female.
"sjw" is a slur. The term "social justice" is used by literally everyone, most notably the members themselves:

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-gro...

http://www.sjti.org/

http://www.socialjusticetoolbox.com/

^ from just the first page of a google search.
This measures percentage, not absolute numbers. The percentage dropped because loads of men joined tech when tech became lucrative. Before that it was a niche field.
I think that you meant "tenets" instead of "tenants".
> It's not a good feeling to wonder if your new colleague would have been rejected if she were male

Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?

> or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color

This is utter bullshit. As someone who used to work for Alphabet, gender and ethnic background never came up during interviews, simply because the interview process does not account for that. You are either able to solve the technical problems you are presented with during the interview or not. "Culture fit" - which is the one item that might be influenced by things related to gender or ethnic background - is actually a liability for minority groups.
Thank you internets and HN for participating in our extensive experiment.

In this experiment, we monitored how we could manipulate opinions and elicit reactions by posting content on different mediums.

Unfortunately, due to the classified nature of this study, we can't really reveal more to you right now.

Also, we made a fuck tonne of money! You helped fund the whole thing, and then some!

No, you can't have the data. Really now, I'm surprised you even asked.

- The Man in the Shadows
The standard rule of thumb seems to be that it's okay to punch up, but not down.

A minority can complain about a majority, but the reverse is frowned upon. The amount of "frowned upon" is amplified by the degree to which the minority the majority impugns has been historically hurt by similar opinions.
While his premises regarding women in technology are certainly debatable, he was spot on talking about the organizational culture at a Google. He couldn't have proved that point any better than he did.
If I learned one thing from these government programs, it's that they'll be gamed, badly.
I didn't say that the factual claims were wrong, I said that the scientists quoted in the article were not in a position to confirm them. Someone with appropriate domain expertise would be able to do so, but none appear to have been asked.
> Probably one of the most incorrect sweeping generalizations I have ever seen.

Not really, you simply didn't read my comment and the comment I responded to very thoughtfully.

The point of my reply is twofold. First, the obvious: you wouldn't take that loan unless you needed the money for your education (or wanted to gamble on the stock market, apparently, as one poster mentioned, but let's put that aside). If you can pay for your education without it, with saved money or through scholarships or grants, you'll do it. If you can't pay for your education, you take the loan. In that sense it wasn't a deep point, it was basically a tautology to point out how vapid the grandparent's comment was: "the thing we have to do is not borrow money we can't repay," "borrowing money you can't repay is a broken local protocol." As if arranging student loan financing were in some way similar to extending credit to a successful business that needs a little extra cash on hand until the end of the month. Ridiculous.

Second, and on to the more important point that I made in the second paragraph: if we assume the grandparent really means "will not be able to repay after several years of college" the problem with this whole line of thinking becomes obvious. The average student embarking on college has no idea whether they'll graduate successfully. They have no idea whether they'll be able to find a job in their field and they certainly have no idea how much they will be paid. In short, they have no idea whether they'll be able to repay that loan. In terms of policy, saying they should not take a student loan which they will be unable to repay is not an answer to anything since at best they're making an educated guess. In a situation like that, where people are guessing, the expected outcome is that a lot of people will guess incorrectly.
It absolutely does. If the claim is that men are more striated, it makes a big difference whether the bar is 105 or 145. In fact, it is core to the argument. If it's 105, then the difference won't be statistically significant. If it's 145, you'd practically expect only men.
When Kafka Met Orwell: Arrest by Algorithm
And Clojurescript's are implemented in Clojurescript!
That would probably be Google's position.

It could easily be defeated as it presumes the author would not be able to demonstrate that he could be a member ( does not have to be ) of a protected class. Remember, should that be the case authors goal is not to score a touch down, it is to get a new set of downs i.e. move forward with a lawsuit.

Judges are very reluctant to toss something out that early if there's even an ounce of a possibility there could be a merit in a case.
I don't think testing and QA hit the same sweet spot. Trying to automate acceptance tests often gets into brittle territory, doubly so on mobile apps. Obviously it depends a lot on the nature of the product, but in a lot of cases human QA (perhaps with QA engineers building some partial automation) leads to a higher quality product at a lower cost than trying to get fully automated test coverage for everything.