skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you actually read the memo or only left leaning articles misrepresenting content of it?

Google shot themselves in the foot by pandering to SJW style cry bullies.

> "$1 million in bonuses" was changed to "$100 million as a compensation" after Damore was "fired" by a Mr Kunda Píča whom I have never heard of; Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.

Source: http://motls.blogspot.si/2017/08/james-damore-deserves-1-mil...
Well correlation has not direction of causality, but I get your point.

Although not sure why you see it that way, seems easier to explain the other way around to me.
I would look in the same places as white men look for these jobs. I am in a country where six figure salaries aren't the norm for Engineers.
Except it wasn't a call to open discussion, it was an anonymously published manifesto that directly affected other members of the company. You can't just publish a manifesto about the benefits of slavery without some backlash, you can't publish your opinion that we should repeal the laws against religious discrimination without backlash either, nor can you publish your opinions about race or gender without expecting backlash because publishing those opinions inside a company where those groups are present is inherently threatening.

It's been accepted for a long time that the place for arguments against racial, religious, or gender programs is not the workplace. I'm a man and I find his manifesto an issue, he said things about men that are blatantly untrue, and frankly unhealthy as well, and I wouldn't want to work with him.

People's opinion on their coworkers is for private discussions with their manager and HR, and don't get precedence over their colleagues comfort and security at work. It's been that way since black people got rights and women got the vote.
This is brilliant, for commercial Airbnb operators. Depending on who you are that might be good or bad, but I won't wade into the debate :)

I did a more basic analysis when looking at the most profitable Airbnb cities a few months back: https://www.travelstatsman.com/06022017/cities-airbnb-hosts-...
I expected any discussion of the memo to be quickly shut down, its supporters classed as filthy misogynists. It was surprising to see over 1,000 comments and upvotes. I'm glad that it's becoming OK to discuss these topics again.
Everybody blames the author for creating a disturbance, but you can't create a disturbance without people being interested in what you say.

This. This is the core of what's going on.

I wish this was the #1 reply on this thread.
So this is a common talking point, and I'd like to flip your case around, because the belief that people from a caste are inferior human beings isn't as widespread in the US.

So what you are really saying is there's a problem with affirmative action for lower castes, because large numbers of people assume that they are inferior. That's the problem your friend has. That's she's brilliant, and lots of people assume she isn't because of some arbitrary prejudice. This is the same arbitrary prejudice that the affirmative action seeks to remedy, and so these attitudes to affirmative action, in themselves, prove the need for affirmative action.
Everything is measured very accurately. The 10% variation is in bioequivalence, not in the amount of the active ingredient.

For people taking drugs with a narrow therapeutic index, though, that variation is huge.
Dahmakan is Malaysia’s first startup to be accepted into Y Combinator
I think you are also misjudging the effects, and to talk about ability is harmful to the very debate. There are some differences in ability, but they seem to even themselves out (men are better at mental rotation, women have better visual memory, etc.), the total effect on general intelligence appears to be none.

However, there are measurable psychological differences when it comes to preference of the role you want to take, how much risk you are willing to take, and what your priorities regarding status and family are, and we do have evidence that some of it is, at least partially, biological.
> We need a manifesto on White Male Persecution Complex Culture in Tech.

Why don't you write one? Would that get you fired?
The fact that group X is known to use certain tactic does not mean Y is using it too.

In any case, screaming "WE'RE NOT EVEN DISCUSSING THAT!" and calling for getting the person fired is hardly a proper response. What I'd like to see is a fact-based response to the memo, showing numbers/reasoning for the individual policies, etc.

My main take away is you really can't openly discuss this topic (not just in Google), which was one of the points. Ironic.
White male, so checking my privilege, however I know my "widening participation" status influenced certain opportunities I had access to in the run up to university, and quite likely as part of a numbers game for the university place itself.

I've often thought about how I feel knowing something as simple as the postcode I grew up in affected how I got somewhere, but always arrive at it being a net positive.

There are pros and cons to it all of course, and it doesn't take away from the fear that you don't deserve it. But, society needs to kickstart the fortuitous cycle of opportunity, direction and inspiration somehow. When a group of people have no role models, nobody empathetic of their route or life chances or aware of any other skills they can bring, we can't progress.

When we're talking about whether someone is more or less qualified, it's not like it's a AAA+ grade male vs a CCD- female. It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table.
You speak of "the calculus of a responsible corporation" and "the job of government" as if unrelated phenomena. The latter authors the corporate law that sets the former. And it would take an extreme case indeed for a company's directors or employees to violate a fiduciary duty by implementing a diversity hiring initiative. Even if there were a plausible argument that a given initiative "cost" the company relative to other hiring practices, there will almost always be plausible arguments why incurring the "cost" is in the company's best long-term interests, all things considered, in which case courts will defer to business judgment.
Even if there is bias, in what position is Google to fix it? Unconscious bias retraining does not work.

If bias exists it is culturally and biologically motivated and that can only be fixed by changing the culture significantly.

Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact. In countries where gender roles are being silenced (that's a good thing) women dislike STEM even more!

I went to a STEM focused high-school that had equal numbers of women and men (3000 students). Not the same percentage went for STEM fields after graduation. Women were also more successful during high-school. Every year the questionnaire confirms that women just aren't interested in STEM and go to fields that deal with people much more (medicine and similar social fields - rehabilitation, working with children with disabilities, social work etc.))
He posted his thoughts on internal forum. If there is anyone who should be fired, it is the person that leaked it outside.
I think the biggest implication is how far they're willing to go to compromise commerical hardware. This could ruin Juniper, a large US company. It's insane that the government allowed them to do this.

The first thing I think of is phone basebands. If they're hacking enterprise firewalls I have to assume they've already exploited the baseband in the vast majority of phones. It's the one place they can stick a software plant over the airwaves.

I think it's time to call for open source basebands, anything else just isn't safe anymore.
I love when people reference the fire in a theatre argument, because I learned from Christopher Hitchens that the reference is actually about prosecution of a group of Yiddish people protesting Wilson dragging us into WW1 (after getting elected on the promise not to), and Oliver Wendell Holmes used the bullshit example of yelling fire in a crowded theatre to support the conviction!

Also, Google has already shown it wants to be an arbiter of morals. For example, perhaps its lost in this topic, but on my conspiracy forums what people are upset about is Google apparently has been expanding censorship efforts and have hired certain groups to assist in deeming content innapropriate... Such "neutral" groups as the fucking ADL! So if you have a YouTube video calling Israels occupation of Palestine "apartheid" that's worthy of censorship. Don't even get me started about the Google execs shady relationship with the deep state and certain powerful politicians. Google turned evil a long time ago, and they are only getting worse.
a) i agree that it's a problem for the whole society not just the corporates. it starts by far earlier as you said

b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible

most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management

a few years ago even <10% [2]

[1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu...
[2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...
Resources about Science
That is what I point out in my previous replies.
You can look also at:

* US (Roosevelt) planned for nearly destruction of after war Germany, fortunately Hoover stopped that policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_indust...

* Living with 1200 calories per day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

* Another strange behavior is that Allied forces imposed to De Gaulle to "whitewash" its troops before entering Paris. I suppose it was a only trick to make it impossible for French troops to enter in Paris without having to refuse bluntly, but that shows that the demand of "having only white soldiers" was considered to be perfectly normal and acceptable by UK and US forces.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7984436.stm
Mate is my go-to interface. Very slick and fast. Any number of workspaces easily accessible, minimalistic.
God forbid a monolithic, trillion dollar corporation have an employee saying things they don't like.
Curious what IDE you have set up to do the REPL driven development you mentioned? I'm just starting out in learning Clojure and am finding various options out there with vigorous proponents of each. I am wondering what someone's real-world experience is after 5 years.

It's hard sometimes to find the editors/IDEs that might suite one particularly well since the vast community is attached to a given platform.
Gnome is too slow and clunky for me to enjoy
Hot damn that was much appreciated and eloquently said. Thank you.
Diversity programs have been shown to be ineffective at reaching their stated aims. A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies found that implementing diversity training programs has little positive effect and may even decrease representation of black women. [0]

They seem to be used by companies as a "shield" when sued for discrimination. [1] The so-called “diversity defense”. It worked for WalMart.

[0]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122406071004...

[1]: https://hbr.org/2016/01/diversity-policies-dont-help-women-o...
GCHQ challenges you to crack codes for charity with its first ever puzzle book
4 and a half wives? would you mind to explain?
> it is very much not obvious to me that this doesn't count as meaningful engagement.

Unfortunately you can't call posting a document full of your opinions and conclusions meaningful engagement.

That's just meaningful self indulgence.

To be fair, perhaps he thought it was, and was trying to do the right thing, and did it wrong? I'm prepared to go as far as giving him the benefit of the doubt on that front.

...but it was wrong. For all the reasons that have been posted extensively on this topic; but, specifically: engaging meaningfully with a topic means discussion; and although we're having a discussion now, that's because this forum allows it, which is not something that that internal memo allowed.

Basically, tldr: Posting documents != meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means actually talking to people, organizing people into groups and delivering your message to the right people. All of that project managery stuff that people don't want to do.

I get it. ...but you gotta do it. That's life. You don't just get to sit in a cave and pontificate and call it engagement.
I got real into AA back in day, when I thought I was on the receiving end of reverse discrimination.

I learned that the biggest part of AA is actually just letting the kids know they qualify. We grow up with the narrative that after highschool you do college; and that you'll succeed at going somewhere. Not everyone gets that narrative, so a big part of AA is finding the kids that qualify for admission / scholarship / etc, and letting them know that. The next part is helping them apply; if no-one you know has ever navigated an academic bureaucracy, it's confusing and intimidating.

It's like the Black Panthers. Everyone knows about the least of their efforts (police watch), because it's also the most controversial. Few people know about the bulk of their efforts (school lunches) because it's not.
Hate to be that guy and I know it's just for fun, but that is not a one-liner.

Not at a 135-characters length :)

And I'm not even accounting for the 1-char useless var/func names.

EDIT: To clarify, I don't think that the above "1 liner" has anything to offer.
1) It's not pythonic, 2) it's not 1-liner by any of python's standards and 3) it's a bad example of programming.

While on the other hand there are numerous other 1-liners that do not have these bad traits.
Maybe you should perform even a rudimentary google search before dismissing others:

Marriage is for rich people

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/economix/2012/02/06/marriag...

"A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income."

"Whatever the case, the concentration of marriage among the richest Americans is amplifying the increase in income inequality."
For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US.

This is the thesis of the piece. The rest is an extended critique of Americans.

I have difficultly buying into the thesis, so the rest of it reads like a very long-winded opinion piece with the standard throwaway charges about how the U.S. is horribly bad.

This seems to be a perennial topic and folks all over the world eat it up. It's nice to see it done in such a talented way. Just not my thing.
> An interface on linux has only one ip address.

Eh?

$ ifconfig lo
lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 65536
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10<host>
loop txqueuelen 1000 (Local Loopback)
Probably similar to herding cats – too many opinions and too many directions to get pulled in. My girlfriend worked in an artists' co-op with equal share and high level of democracy. Everybody's ideas are always great so as to not to hurt anybody's feelings and if anything needs to get done, it takes weeks of roundabout talk just to end up with a monstrosity full of compromises.

I guess there needs to be some degree of hierarchy, just like with state elections, to constrict opinions and epitomise the main idea so there are not too many cooks undoing each other's work.
> Only someone who is not a woman or not from a minority could say this.

How could you possibly know that?
Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same for ever.

Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
One can prepare- build a bunker that could survive on venus.
> Reservation policy has denied hordes and hordes of exceptionally smart, hardworking and merit people their rightful chance of doing good in life. It continues to. This has been one of the key reasons for mass exodus of these people to foreign lands.

Proof?
On the other hand, pure oleic acid isn't especially toxic. It's a major component of Lorenzos oil.
Frickin' Sharks
It's nowhere near as perfect as utorrent once was. But it's pretty good and I have plenty of extra memory (it's currently using 305mb while seeding 40+ torrents, dropping down to 65mb if I pause them all.)
Not really true: Czech republic have one of the most homogenous population in the world (95%, 97% if you count Slovaks which we used to share the country with) and still the the score is just 23%.
> You do see that you are comparing 1. woman being biologically inferior to 2. sports affiliations.

No I'm not. I'm saying that there is a distinction between being offended/outraged and being harassed. Just because someone is offended by something doesn't mean it's harassment. My examples were explicitly meant to be silly to demonstrate the point.
Without digging too deep into the rest of this issue, do you consider Asian men white? Or is the situation a little more complicated than white men only choosing their own?
I believe he was agreeing with your point.
> It's (in almost all cases), very small variations of tangential achievements, most of which can be outweighed with a minority group bringing a different group of life experiences to the table.

Actually, diversity initiatives can decrease cultural diversity in tech. Many diversity initiatives leave immigrants behind and mainly benefit Americans.

It can be said that foreigners are considered more "culturally diverse" than Americans in USA based workplaces. Diversity programs might increase gender and racial diversity, but also decrease foreign representation as a result and make a company less culturally diverse.
Astroid, a GTK/webkit mail user agent usable with the keyboard
And explain to me why some bureaucratic organization is responsible for correcting for this disproportion.

On average in the United States (I say average because someone here is bound to call me an Asian supremacist when I am just taking statistics), Asians make up the highest percentage of college applicants [1], Asians have the highest average SAT scores [2], Asians are the most likely to enter and graduate college [3], and Asians make up the highest income bracket in the US [4].

Given these trends, we should, in fact, see a larger number of Asians in tech and it should not be surprising. Google's bureaucracy should not hire less Asians because "there are more."

I would not mind if Google were 100% Black females. Just as long as it's a merit based system.

[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webAdmission%20Preferen...
[3] https://nscresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Signature12...
[4] https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
[4] summary on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Compiler benchmark GCC and Clang on C++ library
Yup. 50% is possible if you reject 3-4 men for every woman you hire for a programmer position.

I don't think the percentages in management really matter because you tend to get promoted from lower rungs. Management % probably reflects the programmer hires 5-10 years ago.

We really need to look at the percentage of female applicants. In the ~1000 applications I've seen directly from indeed etc, less than 20% we're female. I didn't count, but it seemed closer to 10%. It's so bad that for some job listings I remember not receiving a single female application for 20+ males.
In Europe we don't (seem to) have the fratboy culture, but there are still very few women in tech. (Regarding race, certain groups seem to be overrepresented and others underrepresented) its mainly white guys, but Europe is mainly white.
What if they're not just as good? What if they could be as good, but aren't interested? That part isn't fact, it's an assumption - one that it's time to reexamine given that things have turned out differently from how we expected.
The most mature Clojure development environments right now are Spacemacs/Emacs with CIDER (free) and IntelliJ IDEA with the Cursive plugin (commercial, but inexpensive). Both are excellent.
And with hot fuming nitric acid, you'd go up in flames.
I am working on solving this problem at the moment - I'm building a product that lets anyone build the ETL pipelines that produce inputs for a ML model. If anyone's interested in beta access (coming month or two) let me know, davedx@gmail.com
Open source baseband only won't be enough, there are plenty of CPUs/MCUs capable of running backdoors/malware spread on any modern board (heck, even battery controller often runs on a full fledged MCU). Until we have an open hardware + software, we will never be safe from government and other well-funded crooks.
Yes. The difficulty is that the more joints there are, the more possible solutions there can be.
My 2 cents.

I did write an essay but this is the TLDR.

Google has made a giant political mistake. Everybody saw this coming. Straight into the fire, Google must have known that even as they did it.

If Google's real aim was non-talent-bias, we already know the solution: blind hiring.

Let's use a little metacognition here. People on HN are highly likely to be in the Bubble (same way as average academic must be left of center). They belong to the Valley and will rationalize these kinds of events all day long, it's worthy of "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!". Rightists are penalized in SV. That's been true for a while, that is the bottom line. This forum itself used to contain more rightists.

I don't know the future for Google or SV but the upshot is that if I found a company it will explicitly not hire leftists. I will have internal cohesion in my mini one party state. Do I want "diversity of ideas/perspectives". Yes, but the atmosphere is already poisoned by events like this and the firing of Brendan Eich. Plainly nobody has the right answers so I'd opt for political uniformity to keep infighting at bay.

More broadly I suspect Affirmative Action is on the ropes which means that SV is way behind the curve.

tldr;tldr; Somebody as brilliant as Peter Thiel would be fired today, or more likely: never hired. That is where we are at.