skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding of QM is only surface-level, so there may be subtleties I'm missing, but this presentation's arguments against the many-worlds interpretation seem pretty weak.

Page 28 grudgingly alludes to the idea that MWI could be simpler than other theories ("Objection based on surprisingly common misconception that standard QM defined solely by Schrödinger's equation ... It is only within a many-worlds framework that this view could begin to make sense"), but later introduces MWI as a contender beginning with a nonsense news headline and then characterizes it as intuitively bizarre for proposing a large multiverse, as if the size for its proposed multiverse was an obvious point against it. It seems to me there's an implied misuse of Occam's razor: "Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" is most properly applied to the number of rules in a theory, not the amount of matter a theory predicts. (If you apply it based on the amount of matter a theory predicts, then Occam's razor surely should rule out theories that dim clusters of light in the sky correspond to trillions of galaxies like our own, and should prefer theories that predict that they're illusions, reflections, or something otherwise insignificant that fits the observations.)

Page 39 and 40 both quote paragraphs from books that seem more convincing to me than the presentation's seemingly hand-waving refutations. Page 40's refutation appears to do nothing but insist upon PWT's "epiphenomenal 'pointer'", naming our branch as real and explaining away the many deep interactions of other branches as only being "mathematical significant" rather than having "ontological significance". ... Maybe this is a bad time to mention my preference for the Mathematical universe hypothesis ("which posits that all computable mathematical structures (in Gödel's sense) exist"), which seems to make the idea of something having mathematical significance but not ontological significance meaningless.
My point has in fact very little to do with how you choose to frame the point at issue; rather, it takes issue with the supposed principal underlying it, which is that there should be no "things you cannot say".

Clearly there are plenty of things we all (to a first approximation) agree that you cannot in earnest say at your workplace.
Google also has a right to not be associated with his speech. He is free to work somewhere else and pen hateful missives.
I had trouble loading the webpage. Here is a mirror/cached copy.

https://archive.is/VlNfl
If you know that some idiot wrote this manifesto as a manager, could you assign a woman to work with him? Not in good conscience. An open culture is desirable because it lets the company get going with what its shareholders want it doing.
He literally says that those hiring practices can effectively lower the bar.

Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
No? He's addressing, in part, preferences, that are distributed differently.

If some women, on average, want to do things differently than men, on average, that will result in some apparent gap in the averages -- not because of advantage, disadvantage or bias, but because you're looking at a difference in average preference.
> It's not about virtue signaling, he was almost certain to be terminated just because it was a ridiculously stupid thing to say - you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar and expect people not to be upset about it

It should absolutely be ok, if it's true. Which it unequivocally is.

> (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).

What about his post was pseudo-scientific? He cited studies, and to my knowledge, the actual facts of what he said are fairly uncontroversial.

> - The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote?

Did you read the document? He explicitly embraces diversity. He even says he's in favor of programs to help promote diversity.
Discriminatory hiring does not imply that under-qualified workers are hired. In fact, the author takes case to specifically mention that these discriminatory practices resulted in a higher false-negative rate for non-diverse employees - not a higher false-positive rate for diverse employees.
"I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it."

He didn't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. As the Supreme Court decided applies to the government, so should private industry use as their guideposts.

Google just took a public step forward in becoming an arbiter of morals. Which is frightening given how much of the de facto internet they control.
It seems well thought out:

* malloc/free (ref counting GC)

* memory pooling (no heap, stack-based for memory constrained systems)

* third party allocators

* third party GC

Details here: http://ferret-lang.org/#sec-4-2
Yes but I haven't been talking about just Google, and I have been talking about applying in the first place. My point was that some people may not apply, thinking that those jobs require more experience than they do. Think entry-level vs. junior.
Ironic really...
Suggestions
I hope it’s clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that
we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of
those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that
don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender
roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another
member of their group (tribalism).

Google responds to the article by being knee jerk intolerant to the ideology...

Guess he was kinda right?
Investigated the grand parent's question myself, though not extensively. The stackoverflow comment contains a lot of items which aren't true (couchbase does have document id's). The replication is multi-master but is cluster wide, which means couchbase has really nice tools to manage adding/removing nodes but doesn't offer ad-hoc replication (AFAIK). The SO comment also lists a bunch of things which won't matter to many devs like pure http-rest api as they'll end up using client libraries anyway from a middle tier layer.

Not to say Couchdb doesn't have many great advantages like the rest api and self-hosted apps, couchbase does to my mind seem like a good but not 100% alternative to couchdb (and vice-versa). Mainly I like that incremental map reduce is still available along with the atomic type of documents and revisions but clustering is still much more developed in CB.
At the risk of repeating myself, the memo's author did in fact say that "Google has created several discriminatory practices", which include "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates". What else are we supposed to infer from the author's assertions if not that at least some of Google's diversity candidates have been let in because of weakened standards? Is he talking about a hypothetical, alternate-universe Google? It doesn't seem so, despite the passive tone of the memo.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Opinions and culture can cause real harm. This was the basis for the scientific argument used in Brown v Board. That even if you could make everything literally equal, these sorts of spoken biases really do lead to measurable negative effects on people's lives.
>This comes down to your views on a single question: do you have to be tolerant of opinions or actions that harm others? Right now, I think most progressives say no, conservatives obviously say yes. That is the actual gray area this comes down to.

Firing someone is a harmful action. Progressives obviously support this.

As for your cartoon - Categorizing anyone who disagrees with your values as a cartoon villain of pure evil, deserving of no rights and no response but violence, is the foundation of evil. The cartoon glorifies harmful action - and it's a great representation of the far left now.

Progressives absolutely tolerate opinions and actions that harm others - they hold the opinions and commit the actions with great energy.
Migrating from a Monolith to APIs and Microservices
Argh! Yes, the communication was incredibly bad because Dries was afraid if he spills the entire thing as is then the woman in question would be blamed for him forcing Garfield to step down. In https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/drupal-association-a... finally you can find

> The actions that led me to ask Larry to resign involve a woman who attended Drupal community events with Larry, and was "allowed" to contribute by him.

Also: check who is posting here. If you think I have any axe to grind relating to Drupal then you missed a few things last year. Like http://drupal.sh/karoly-negyesi-chx-ousted-from-drupal-commu... this. If there is anybody left who can take a neutral stand now, it's me. I have neither to gain nor to lose from siding with either party. And, I sided with Larry up until the latest statements clarified things.

This doesn't mean others were not doxxing Larry -- but that was not the reason behind asking him to step down.
Thanks a lot for your answers guys. I'll be using the things you mentioned. (y)
Fair question. That is something you'd take to HR.

If you think you can't have that conversation with HR (fear of retaliation or mis-understanding etc), then I perhaps a consultation with a attorney that specializes in labor law and the workplace.

That is what I'd do if I felt it was a real problem.
A relevant kid's story:

The Racist Tree

By Alexander Blechman

Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree.

"Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl.

"I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a nigger.

"I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name.

It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree.
The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field.

"Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly.

"Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child.

The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children.

And so, social progress was made.
That is generally where I am on these issues as well. It's very frustrating that even if you were much more reasonable in trying to discuss these issues than this Googler was, you'd likely be fired for it anyways. As someone from a poor background who also suffers from mental illness, it's frustrating that all of that is totally ignored, and that I'm expected to be enthusiastic about a policy that advocates for giving preferential treatment to a wealthy white woman over me in hiring or promotion. And I don't think my circumstances should just be taken into account under this system, I just don't think positive discrimination belongs in the work place.
You're not giving that a remotely fair reading. He literally calls for people to be treated as individuals while acknowledging and calling attention to traits that populations (read: large numbers of people) exhibit.

I'm really having trouble finding anything to be upset about in his "manifesto". He's literally being fired for trying to start a serious conversation about a delicate issue.
How interesting, I have read other articles too. I am unqualified to make any authoritative claims on this subject (and many others), but people who seem to be just that appear to disagree with you.

Most arguments against the manifesto (sic) I have seen, seem to be either ad hominem or claiming some form of "discrimination" .. as in prejudice. In the light of the current discussion around gender, mostly in the US, I am just not convinced. And it seems that many people who actually are qualified agree (no, a group of self referencing "gender studies" professors does not convince).

Anyway, it's coming up 5AM here and I will not bother you further with my slave-owner-descendant misconceptions.
What host is that? GCE? How much quota do you need for a tech blog (as opposed to kardashian watch or whatever)?
I respectfully disagree with you here. Why do I have to "own" inclusion and equality just because I disagree with the specific implementation? Why can't it be the responsibility of the VP of Inclusion to figure this out in a way that doesn't blatantly favor one class of people over another?
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

> - Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]

> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates

> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

> - Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)

> - Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]

He is saying quite a bit more than that Google is hiring too many women and minorities: he's claiming, in straightforward terms, that Google is illegally discriminating when doing so.

Yes, in theory there's a world in which he's right (I'm pretty sure that's not this world) but he is definitely making the claim either way.
Watching YouTube Without Using Mouse
First of all, nobody said the target was 50/50 or even 75/25. If you want to know the actual percentage makeup of the population (or even of computer science grads, or college grads) it's very trivial to find those numbers using Google. Google's race and gender makeup (in general, but especially in engineering) is far off the mark.

I already mentioned some of the ways you can expand your candidate pool. There are tech firms in other states/cities with more reasonable race balances than Google, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v...
With the vast financial resources at its disposal and the (generally) positive brand recognition it has, Google absolutely is in a position where they could recruit more people of color and more women. They have to identify the right steps to take, and then take them - both significant challenges, especially if your employees actively resist every step involved.

Honestly though at this point, this is a well understood issue. It's not a completely solved problem but many companies have no difficulty recruiting a diverse workforce.
> Ideas must be able to be freely discussed, argued, and debated in a free and democratic society.

Not everywhere. You don't have to allow the free discussion of ideas by anyone in your home.

Freedom of speech is not a right to voice such speech wherever and whenever you want, or to be free of the consequences of such. Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech.
It is not unless you are a federal employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

If you are a federal employee you are covered by a different law than everyone else, and that does include political affiliation.

https://www.eeoc.gov/federal/otherprotections.cfm
So much of the discussion is about what he said has any truth. I think this is beside the question. He Wrote and distributed materials criticizing his employer's core HR mission while alienating coworkers.

If you're a person targeted in his manifesto, I'd suspect you'd no longer want to work alongside him. That's reason enough to fire him on the spot. He's creating a hostile work environment via coworkers and media.

For those that doubt it, I say try it at your job and see what comes of it.

Honestly, what did he think would happen?
That would take initiative from "the other side".

That won't happen. Because if company leadership, or basically just a group of employees within some company argued for "tolerance" of thought... for example with this Google employee, those individuals would be tarred and feathered just the same.

Does it look like SJW tech industry employees want to discuss and debate ideas?.....

https://twitter.com/polNewsForever/status/894741252977119232
He did not make that claim that
> "He was making an unsubstantiated claim that his coworkers, or at a minimum the sex and/or races they belong to, are inherently deficient at performing the work"
He only claimed that the difference between groups could come from something else than society. To deny that is a much harder argument which could only be proved to exceptional evidence. Basically he's saying 'some' and you say 'never'.

AFAIK the IQ difference between genders is negligible, but the spread of the IQ is much greater in the male group. This also means that there are more men who are above 130 IQ then women which is kind of necessary to be a programmer. This does not mean that a female can't be a genius! If you want to disprove this you can do two things:
1., Prove that the average female IQ is way higher than mens.
2., Prove that there are as much women who are intellectually retarded ( sorry, English is not my first language, I don't know a better word ) than woman.
He's saying that's why the gap exists, but he's saying it on an aggregate level, not an individual one. He's not saying all women are disadvantaged, he's saying the proportion of women who are unqualified is greater than the proportion of men who are.
>People are suffering right this second around the world by those that advocate the same thoughts as you are

People suffer for other reasons too though, like societal inaction and economics. Do you hold yourself to the same standard, with your lifestyle choices affecting others as they do, in the same regard that you're holding others for their political ideas? Have you adopted dozens of children from third world countries instead of creating more mouths to feed? Do you ride a horse to work to reduce your climate impact? Have you optimized your entire life for the supremely calculated reduction of suffering? How would such a calculation even be verified correct? Where does that line get drawn in your world? Is it simply on people with philosophies that are convenient for you to criticize to make yourself the superior humanitarian?
If there is systemic discrimination in favour of group A, then the only way to fix that discrimination is to eliminate it. To the members of group A (in this case, mainly white men), that feels like discrimination. It isn’t discrimination, but that’s what the loss of power and representation feels like. Even if you step it down through affirmative action programs, group A feels like it’s being discriminated against…

…which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.)

By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work.

People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team.

And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.)

If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
In his follow-up, he makes the point that producing this sort of list gives a false sense of comfort as (almost by definition) you produce controversial opinions that are nevertheless acceptable to say. I personally have views that are far more controversial than those, and which I am absolutly not willing to post publicly (even pseudo-anonymously).

Having said that (and falling into the de-railing track):

>hate crime laws are institutionalized double jeopardy.

How so? I am not an expert (and only have any knowledge of the US system), but aren't hate crimes considered enhancers to existing crimes. That is, to be found guilty of a hate crime, you must also be found guilty of an underlying crime; if you are found not-guilty of the actual crime, then you can not be tried for the hate crime. Being found guilty of a hate crime only serves to increase the severity of punishment for a normal crime that you have been convicted of.
Dude gets fired for violating company policy, people have been fired for much less. Why is everyone getting their panties in a knot? Why isn't this post being flagged like all the other ones about the manifesto itself?
Far from "widely-believed"? "Highly doubtable"? Are you sure about that?

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
You can find 4 scientists who'll tell you global warming is a hoax. Just find one who can take this manifesto, provide a thoughtful analysis, collect published critiques and discuss and argue them.

This just seems to be a few modestly credentialed academics really just using this as a springboard for their own view points.