skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By that logic anyone criticizing a company's hiring practices must be fired.

If someone claims their employer discriminates against black candidates, you must equally infer they think some of their white coworkers have been let in because of weakened standards, and out they go...

I mean, I'll admit there is a small core of logic there, but I think it's pushed absurdly far. Wouldn't it make more sense if hiring standards could be discussed without firing anyone who wants to change them?
This phenomenon is nothing new.

Look at the right wing movements in history. Fascism, Nazism or any other right wing movements. These largely arise because there is too much politically correct talk going on, and at some point a guy comes along and musters the courage to say all the things openly what others had been wanting to say for years. What he says could be totally wrong and may be even absurd. But the fact that people just need a vent to release years worth of accumulated pressure will buy a lot of public validity.

Once this happens the public support, mood and direction swings too much to the other end. At this point PC won't even matter.
> Why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles?

Founding a business requires considerable access to capital. Investors are less likely to invest in an unusual coop structure than in a bog-standard company. Workers may have to pool their own resources to found the company, which means that they are risking their own financial assets.
The whole "power imbalance" definition is a tremendous wedge to divide and conquer groups that would ordinarily be on the same side of an issue of basic human decency. "I can say what I like and it's not racist because I am [fill in the blank]."

To say nothing of the muddiness of a 'power imbalance'. I have been the only white kid on my block, and I got my ass kicked more than a few times because of it. Was there a power imbalance on the block? Sure. Was there a power imbalance in the school or court system the other way? Absolutely. Who's the victim this time? Where does the dividing line between them being racist and me being racist lie?

The stop sign? The school boundary?

Lot of those dudes, we became friends after knocking the hell out of each other for no reason, and let me tell you, we walk into their house and systemic racial prejudice popped right up again, poor family, bad education, trouble with the law. "You're so smart, help Alejandro with his homework and then you can play nintendo. Yes Ms. P."

So at school, I'm racist, on the block, they're racist, inside their house, I'm sort of racist but I still might catch a beating if the wrong cousin was hanging out because his dad was in jail again and he's looking for a skinny white kid to blame.

What a muddled mess. How could you make sense out of that gibberish?
This is another maddening component - who actually argues that men and women are the same? Everyone courageously disagrees with this, but I seriously cannot find anyone actually advancing that viewpoint. It's this weird blind spot. I tried asking a few times in another thread, and the only replies I got were from people trying to debunk it.

Of course men and women are different, duh. The problem isn't that premise. The problem is the arguments people make from it.

You get the feeling that there are these legions of people that assume that liberals are in favor of diversity programs because liberals believe men and women are the same. And then these legions of people point to a study that shows men and women aren't the same, and then they feel, "A-ha! Take that, liberals!" It's completely mystifying to me.

We're not in favor of diversity programs because of a belief that men and women are the same. We're in favor of diversity programs because we know that people will use these differences as excuses to discriminate against women. This is not hard to understand!
lmao, questioning why it's wrong to piss off large swaths of the company by questioning whether or not they should have been hired. that's rich.

let me know what industry you work in where you can poison the well so badly and not get canned.
This is an extremely different takeaway from mine. From what I read, the author repeatedly made it clear that he is not stating that women or racially underrepresented workers at Google are individually worse at their job. In fact, most of his discussion on different tendencies in gender are focused on selection of job field type of job within the field rather than ability. Furthermore, the author repeatedly reiterates that these tendencies are just that: tendencies, not rules. Some women pull 70+ hour work weeks. Some men work part time. To say that a larger portion of one group, even in the absence of cultural and societal pressure, is going to choose either the former or the latter is not disparagement.

To put this in a different context, take the gender discrepancy in murderers. Across nearly all countries, men commit roughly 75-85% of murders. This nearly uniform across agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial countries, rich and poor countries, liberal and conservative countries. I would consider it totally fine to say that men innately have a greater tendency to commit murder than women (and for what it's worth I'm a man myself). Is it okay to say that because I have a Y chromosome I should be treated as a murderer? Or that I should face a different standard of evidence if I'm on trial for murder? Of course not. But stating that I, as a man, am statistically more likely to commit murder than the average woman is not the same as saying I should be presumed to be a murderer and it is not the same as saying that I should face a different standard of evidence. But the point remains, it is okay to conclude that the discrepancy in murder rates is because of innate tendencies rather than discrimination by police, juries, etc.
I hear this argument frequently and it's flawed.

Negative effects are applied in generalities across most aspects of society. Academic research has consistently shown this. Countering effects are also applied in generalities across society.

It is impractical (and not quantifiable) for every instance to be brought forward via an individual lawsuit. While note a perfect analogy, it has similarities to a class-action lawsuit.

We all know it isn't a perfect solution, but it's still better than doing nothing.

In an ideal world, negative effects wouldn't be applied in generalities across segments of society. But that is only very slowly changing.
Your suspicion is basically correct, with regards to relative representation of women in tech in inda/eastern europe vs. the US. (and actually you might add some East Asian cultures e.g. China and Japan to the list of more patriarchal systems with better representation (and anecdotally, middle eastern countries)).
Perhaps there is even a biological reason behind the political posturing: older males tend to have daughters. Engineers marry older.
Imitating Trump with Markov Chains
Google would scout and hire anyone regardless of race or gender if they were talented enough.
Treasured Island: Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa
I had a similar situation with my mail order pharmacy. Ordered a 90-day supply of maintenance medication, was charged brand rates against my deductible. They dispensed the brand rather than the generic. Asked why, they said, well, we have a deal with the company, you get brand drugs at the cost of the generic co-pay! They neglected to understand that some of us don't have co-pays for Rx, and pay the actual cost. Solution? Go to Costco, get 30-day subscription, pay pennies per pill.
Study history or you, too, may be doomed to repeat it:

https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascrip... (transcript at bottom)

https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/the-infernal-semicolon/#comm...

Netscape management gave "make it look like Java" orders. There was no time, on top of this. Last (more below in another reply) no extant command line interpreter was ready to be put in a browser. Way too many non-portable OS dependencies, unsafe FFI, etc. It was JS or bust (aka VBScript).
St. J's?
Ask HN: Is shaving a sign of discipline?
Sorry, so much political and social outrage I feel like it's September 2016. Anyway, to my question:

Does someone who shave daily show more discipline than someone who grows a beard? It takes a daily effort to keep a clean shaven face. Could there be a growing unconscious bias towards those with shaven faces that give an impression of discipline and "togetherness"? Thoughts?
I understand if you don't want to answer this, but is there a subsity covering part of your plan you purchased through healtcare.gov?
Last I checked women like making money too. Likewise, while software becoming lucrative is a global trend, the intense drop in womens involvement is not at all the same globally.

And again, I'm pointing out that the author advanced biological and evolutionary psychology as mechanisms for explaining away this, despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
As I said in another comment, we might need tolerance programs instead of diversity programs. We shouldn't assess anyone by their gender or other bias but for their skills for the job (where I say skills I mean also biological facts, like you have to be tall to be a basketball player o be a women to be a bikinis model, etc)
Parasitic Worm Treatments Could Soon Be Legal in Germany
I've been hit by this too. The scam is really simple:

Take the example in the article: Shire normally sells Adderall for $200. They offer to sell it to UHC for $50. The generic costs UHC $60. UHC takes the generic off the formulary and will only pay for Shire.

For the end user the out-of-pocket cost goes from $10-20 to $50 because brand medications are in the "Premium" category.

By saving $10 UHC sticks you with a $40 higher bill - literally 4x what they are saving.

Targeting this specific behavior is trivially easy: change the law to require insurers to cover generic or brand for any RX at the patient's choice.
He sure doesn't have a PhD in women's studies.
> Asians people are over-represented in Silicon Valley

Some Asians are foreigners, hired by SV firms at lower-than-market salaries. They may be hired because they're less expensive (because they need sponsorship so badly). These types of people make this a much more complicated analogy.

> yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people

Affirmative action policies sometimes do impact Asian applicants, making it less likely for them to be hired.
About 20 years ago I first heard about co-ops, and I thought it was a great idea. So I literally bought every book on the subject that I could find (spent many hundreds) and read all those books. There is a long and rich history of co-ops worldwide. My take away: Most co-ops end up either failing or replicating a power hierarchy - with workers on the losing end. Very few avoid that end, and those that do are those that either exist in markets where they don't have to execute perfectly (such as many successful businesses today) or those that figure out some way to cultivate leaders who make good business decisions (giving them a market advantage, and again letting them operate without exploiting their workers.) In other words, markets still operate as markets, and force business to operate in particular ways unless they can create what are sometimes called "effective monopolies" (based on regions or differentiation or some other advantage). I've become convinced that we need to change the way markets compete if we want any real change.
So you are insisting that when the links you link speak of social justice they speak of the very recent movement that is rooted in the works of critical theory?

I doubt it.

(one of them compares a modern movement to the civil rights movement...)
It should be fair to say the author phrased things to pinpoint the aspect he is concerned about, even if other aspects are statistically inevitable.

Hiring the best and diverse workplaces are both virtues, but sometimes competing virtues. The problem with this entire discussion is that too many people are overly certain that one virtue is more important than the other.
The dude was fired. Bad judgement.... Not some significant philosophical issue here..

I bet a 45 aged techie would know better and still have a job
Show me the data that this is true at google, which is the company we are talking about. I would be very interested to see this data.
There's the Network Operation Center Network Operation Center.

https://www.yelp.com/biz/noc-noc-san-francisco
man I really hope not, that'll make for some extreme noise pollution
If universities can't increase minority enrollment without lowering the bar, what makes you think Google can? I would argue that university affirmative action is the inspiration for how Google and other tech companies are juicing their numbers.
An authoritarian-leaning right currently runs most branches of government in the USA. Is the fear that the majority changes their mind, or that someone else gets to set policy?

Keep in mind that authoritarianism isn't "people I disagree with that have power", it's when democratic elections stop mattering.
What do you mean by a cheap rhetorical trick? It didn't seem that way to me at all. Did I miss something?
Actually a lot of places use flat-rate pricing, where they charge the same rate regardless of how long it actually takes:
https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/auto-repair-labor-ra...
Glibly listing unsafe languages that would have been crippled and flash-frozen if (impossible in the time allotted) jammed into Netscape 2 caused me to find this old comment for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155

Do you actually use JS? What's with the royal "we" that only His Majesty King Crockford (I'm friendly with Doug) can use?
I think HN automatically denotes stories where there are more comments than votes. It might also be manually demoted further by the mods.
What will happen is he'll find acceptance in a different crowd and the authoritarian left has created a visceral enemy instead of trying to change his mind through gentle means.
that's not "women in CS". that's women being awarded CS degrees. I've seen that chart before.

not to say that chart couldn't be related to what's going on now, but it's not helpful to simply point there and say "look science!".
Consumers and blockchain: lots of promise, many hurdles
"so they could also just fire him for any or no reason."

Not really. There are tons of things that it would be illegal to fire someone for.

For example, you can't fire someone for trying to start a union. You can't fire someone because of their race. You can't fire someone because they have workplace complaints.

The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punish an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.

Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."

Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".

These are some interesting argument that I hadn't heard until now. It will be for the courts to decide who is right. But it certainly is not as clear cut as you make it seem.
I'very always wondered how you tease that apart from the native people simply not having the ability to combat naturally caused wildfires. When we suppress them, we employ a ton of technology (from chainsaws to C130s full of red dust) that weren't available back then.
My pet theory is that it's not that we don't want to hire women, it's that they don't want to work here. I've seen one woman's resume and dozens of men's. We hired her. And she is miserable. But so is everyone. But she seems to think that things could be better while lots of men seem to just accept it sucks and don't mind making things worse. Is there a biological reason for the difference? Who cares?
To be clear, bigotry is the intolerance of dissenting opinions, and your post models that perfectly. This is the most fallacious post I've read in a while, notably the absurd notion that the GOP is existentially opposed to trans, etc people (mind you I'm not a Republican or a conservative). It's these sorts of posts which lead people to believe that lliberals are dishonest, hypocritical bigots.
> That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.

You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.

Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.

What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.
The problem with meritocracy isn't something that technology or science can solve, though. It's that there's no reasonable, objective definition of "merit".

Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence.

Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else?

Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard.

Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
Two things:

- Each Googler is expected to do his or her utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.

+ Googlers are expected to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.

- Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Security Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.

+ Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Classification Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
Where are you seeing that? Your comment is the only one here saying anything about patriarchy.
Time to exit Google userbase... I hope I am not too lazy.
Has there been a study that established that the drugs with the same active ingredient don't perform as well?
read the summary on page 6

https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-goi...
This entire article can be summarized as the following: RAID is not a replacement for backups.

Sun/Oracle, and a lot of popular third party documentation, has said as such very openly, and commands like zfs send/recv exist to easily automate zfs cloning (to backup from one zfs fs to another, for example, if you choose to do it that way).

I suspect whoever wrote this missed the boat on why zfs works.
Such a rebuttal would likely be just as controversial as the original. No sane PR person would allow it to be released.
it is a known fact that close to year end Google would go on a "diversity hire" binge to make their diversity numbers look good. literally recruiters are telling female candidates simply to apply and guarantees hire.
>manifestos about your inherent inferiority at performing in technical and leadership roles

I never got that impression from the memo.
Pawn Attack Algorithm for Chess
you raise an interesting point. I'd be curious to see workforce gender distributions outside of the US.
Thanks jxramos, good questions. FTR I had to look up "amphiboly":

> "Linguistically, an amphiboly is an ambiguity which results from ambiguous grammar, as opposed to one that results from the ambiguity of words or phrases—that is, Equivocation."

Your reply - and a handful of rare / unexpected downvotes led me to re-read my comment, and in retrospect I realize I did a poor job communicating. I intended simply to convey my amusement at the ambiguity. I think for all intents and purposes his sentence was an amphiboly.

"Fixing" it would probably involve rephrasing to reverse the order of "people" and "pattern" in the sentence or
just put all the emphasis on the pattern:

"... these patterns, when discovered, have a habit of disappearing"

Strict correctness regarding subject:verb agreement can, like other grammatical constructs, lead to non-idiomatic, awkward phrasing. Formal "rules" about prepositions are the first related example I can think of. ("... of which I can think" is awful, right?). My point was just to laugh at the ambiguity. (shrug)
> They may not be opposed goals but if a method includes the exclusion of certain racial and sex groups then you can not call the method an equality of opportunity.

Actual affirmative action programs do not include the exclusion of racial or gender groups, so your comment is a non-sequitur regardless of its validity in isolation.

> Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.

Which is why its likely affirmative action will always be necessary, though the calibration will need to change over time, because while a cohort having equality of opportunity between subcohorts does not, as you accurately describe, produce equality of outcome, inequality of outcome within the cohort does guarantee inequality of opportunity in the successor cohort.

However, we're nowhere near that sort of nearest-approximation-of-ideal situation where the inequality of opportunity we are concerned with leveling is merely the result of the result of the inevitable inequality of outcome in a prior cohort with equalized opportunity; we still see historically disadvantaged groups (by race/ethnicity, but also gender, gender identity, sexuality, and other axes) continuing to be disadvantaged not only by durable effects of past de jure and de facto discrimination, but also in many cases by overt and covert current discrimination.

> The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good

Every poll I've ever seen breaking out support for affirmative action policies by age groups, and I've seen a lot over the from the early 1990s through the last couple of years, has consistently found support higher among younger Americans. (And also shown overwhelming majority support for Affirmative Action generally, though only minority support for the kind of strict mechanical preference measures which have generally been eliminated many decades ago everywhere except college admissions.)
Zesty is hiring a VP Engineering
what happens if among 100 applicants, 80% are male, 20% female?

Within each bucket, top 25% are qualified; hence 20 male, and 5 female.

But you only have room for 10 positions, 5 for male, 5 for female to reflect customer population

For male, you end up hiring top 5% whereas for female, it's top 25%.

What's an equitable way to address this?