skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>That's where his expertise is focused.

Out of interest, what expertise? He seems to be a psychologist who has multiple times talked about Marxism and postmodernism with the utmost ignorance of current research and philosophy. He also makes "authoritative claims" completely outside his "focus of expertise"[0] and is very wrong about them. Why should he be trusted outside his actual field of expertise?

[0] https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/40520012623631155...
$600 per week.
I have United Healthcare and when I first switched to theme I was informed by my pharmacy that UHC requires one of my prescriptions to be written to require name-brand-only before they can fill it. This often leads to problems filling it because of supply, and the copay is 3x higher, and if the doctors office makes a mistake I have to go back to them to correct it (it's for Adderall, so the pharmacy and doctor cannot exchange the prescription over the phone or computer--I have to do all the back and forth in person with paper).

This is, obviously, quite irritating, not to mention expensive.
You have prejudices about me. I have faced discrimination in another areas of my life. So I think I can have an opinion about it. I have also talked with woman that think the same as me.

Are you discriminating me to give an opinion because I am a male? I don't think it is fair. I could also say that you shouldn't talk about gender equality if you don't live in a country with high gender equality and so you argument doesn't add any value with the discussion.
In the current Ukranian-Russian conflict, there are a lot of ethnic Russians, speaking Russian, fighting on Ukranian side. While there are plenty of traditional ethnical and cultural conflicts around the world which had the chance to turn violent, the relationship between russian and ukranian people was never even close to this, and it's not the basis for the current conflict.
There is one job that is still difficult for a machine to do well (although machines are improving): feature engineering.

ML works very well in bounded/closed domains like image and sound recognition. Open-domains are much more challenging.

Building predictive models from data in specialized domains often require insight, which machines cannot provide. For instance, let's say you collect a bunch of data and are trying to predict sales. You need to apply domain knowledge, experience and intuition to know what variables are causal or correlative. If you just throw all the variables into the mix and build a model from that, you will end up with a model that overfits badly.

There are automated "variable selection" techniques that can help to prevent overfit, but they are mostly imperfect because machines can only detect correlation and not causation. Also, many regression/classification techniques are easily fooled by noise and highly nonlinear relationships. We did some work a few years ago comparing predictive models built from a ton of sensor data (with automated variable selection) vs. one that was parsimonious that was built on select data that we knew accounted for 80% of the effect. The latter model was far superior. Noise/non-causal variables often don't just "wash out" even with very good variable selection algorithms.

It takes domain knowledge to figure out what variables matter and what variables don't.
> about a month in we did a spreadsheet of ~270 questions about how we wanted to live.

Would you be willing to share this spreadsheet?
I'm a veteran whose hiring through 2/4 jobs in the last 10 years has been through a distinct veteran recruiting pipeline. In the other two, my veteran status was likely a factor as well.

As such, I've personally benefited numerous times from diversity hiring programs.

If someone at any of my previous employers had written an internal memo criticizing the respective company's diversity program (ie the funnel through which I was hired), I can't imagine calling for their job, even if the way in which they stated that opinion was offensive to me.

I say this with the understanding that there's an obvious difference between choosing to join the military and being born as a woman or person of color.
Controlling Cyber Conflict
Cujo wants to do for cybersecurity what ADT does for home security
> I've rarely found people that strayed very far from their family in personality, hobbies, and life outlook.

In my experience, that's generally true except for people who moved to a different country at a relatively young age (or just after high school) and stayed in that country. So in the case of OP, if her family lives in Iran and she's in the US, it's likely she has a very different life outlook and cultural view than her family.
Diversity of thought - of which google is now less of.
Those anonyms may be just trolls payed by potential adversaries. It's HN. Divide et impera!
I am somewhat surprised that others are upset he was fired. Free speech doesn't always apply within a company context and speaking politically on either side is a bad idea. Not to mention, while he may have some points, he's approaching a people problem as a statistics problems. With deep rooted issues like this (that have lasted for 100s of years) you can't just pull out data that won't apply going forward if we actually try to make things better...
At least from the perspective of someone who deals with teaching disabled students. The federal DOE determines allocation of resources and ADA compliance of schools. Without federally mandated special needs services many districts could stop offering these services all together.
Another great resource: Bret Victor's "What Can A Technologist Do About Climate Change"

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
It's gonna be great busting out this comment next time dang or another mod is crying that I'm being too mean and hostile to some duped liberal or conservative.
Ah I see what you mean. I suppose I do identify with both the arguments then. Grateful to be born into a society that is as prosperous and free as the one I live and also cognizant that it was at least partially obtained using ventures that were, by today's standards, morally reprehensible.

Kind of a double edged sword though. Any society that currently allows the gratitude probably has a fairly checked past, even those outside the U.S. Not sure where one line begins and another ends.
Perhaps, but that's how humans work sometimes.
I think you have to elide a lot of points about problems specific to women to make this the narrative you write. You have to also just take it as a given that women are to do the lion's share of child rearing (since this is, after all, the main reason why long hours are viewed as a women's issue rather than an issue for all workers).
What age were your kids when you started with this style of traveling?
But not as early as conception, that would be too early. /s /s
There's also a hazing culture in effect. "This is what I had to go through/I paid my dues" sort of thing. Maybe we can just stop paying harassment forward.
A very recent example from me, I had my first appointment at an NHS physio scheduled 4 months after my shoulder dislocation, which is a full month after I already finished recovering by going to a private physiotherapy clinic.
I think this is really difficult thing to explain to someone with zero background in technology. I did my best with this post, let me know if you have improvement suggestions or other comments. :)
Hmm, when we made our first female hire (we are a computer games company), she was a graduate and I did point out that everyone else was male. We offered her the job. She accepted it. She mentioned whilst working she wished more girls worked here so she had someone to talk about girl related things with and go out shopping at lunchtime (it turned out one of the males here knew about shellac nails after this comment and they had a chat about it). Ultimately she moved onto a bigger company a year or so later (the male/female balance wasn't given as a reason, the new job was something excited her a lot more).

I think saying 'can you HANDLE being in a mostly male work environment' is not the right wording. But the decision I took to let a potential candidate know they would be working in an otherwise male only office, I would take again in the same circumstance - it WAS something she was interested to know and WAS something that also came up when she started the job.

I can't speak on behalf of any other women, or scenario in the world, the above is the account of what happened to us. We typically get at least 10X more male candidates to female, and we employ and the same ratio. For about half of the jobs we recruit for, the personal doing the interviewing is female.
>There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine.

Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.
In your numerous replies, two things are clear. You're annoyed that older coders can struggle to get jobs and you think women can start their own companies and programming clubs and seem to be insinuating that they should leave ours alone.

If you're having a problem getting a job 'cause you're old in SV, I'm sorry. I have no such age discrimination problem in the UK, loads of jobs here but not any where as well paid as the US. I might point out that you had 20 years to make a ton of bank. If you want to fix age discrimination, campaign for it, but leave it out of this thread.

As for companies being boys clubs, to me that's clearly unacceptable, it's simply wrong to say that a "company culture" can be male only as that's clear discrimination.

If you think that discrimination's ok, it feels as if you want to take it out on women because you want to go back to living in a man-cave, replete with pizzas and then a late night coding sessions followed by a game of Quake, where women don't fit because they spurned us at high school. And if they want to join in, they better start their own company.

Do that with your mates, that view doesn't belong in a company, shouldn't belong in a company. It's not a male-only social club.

But if you agree that's wrong, you and I caused this problem, and we're the ones who have to fix it, have the opportunity to fix it. Perhaps our Dads and Grandads told us computers are for men only, but they aren't and we don't have to wait until your kids are growing up to fix this. We can fix this now, and positive discrimination is a way that works.

Tech is growing up and we need to fix the gender imbalance we helped cause.
It's not women vs men. It's the feminine and the masculine working together in harmony. We all have a bit of both, unless we're all 100% masculine or 100% feminine, which is not true of my generation or anyone I would actually be able to work with.

It should start with the rise of the feminine in our societal structures to balance the masculine, so that as a society we would balance and harmonize those two archetypes, not cast them as the extremes that they're today. In other words, little girls should not be marketed pink princess dresses while boys get marketed Bob The Builder outfits and tool belts. Gender identity and association starts at an early age and the society we live in promotes the masculine archetype to boys and the feminine archetype to girls. It's wrong. We should be promoting the same balanced masculine/feminine type to both girls and boys. Only then will we see an elimination of gender bias.
> Because it is not fair that compensation should be based on negotiation skills.

It is more fair. Employees are at a disadvantage relative to employers when they can't negotiate.
And given the first few paragraphs explaining how they aren't all like the stereotype, the images were pretty bad.
> what happen if less than 40% want to be in the profession? Are you going to force them to join non-desire careers?

"Nah, we all know CS is the best, and the only logical possibility is that women are being discouraged to do it, because if I chose an IT career, it's obviously the correct choice of profession."
-- Lots of people here.
Does anyone know what the Linux support is like these days?

I see lots of linux improvements in the release but last time I tried it was impossible to get my hands on the really obscure linux alpha build.
Immigration is a perfect example of how the left has traded working class issues for identity politics.

FFS, this story itself is a perfect example. Here we have a corporation firing an employee for 'wrong' speech - and the left is in full support.

That's a class issue, and the left has clearly sided with corporations over the working class.
I am not saying that what Airbnb did was illegal. It probably was not (although I am not at all sure). But, to me, this is a horrible business decision. Left or right is not the point here -- the corporation denying the lodging based on the customer's political views, whichever color those are, makes me put it my lower on my list of travel options.

If a hotel manager wants to ask me about my political views on arrival and, based on this, decide if he lets me stay I will not stay in this hotel and I suspect that a lot of other customers will do the same.
If you're coming to the table with the pre-conceived notion that the program is bad and needs to be shut down without adequate replacement, then that's not in good faith. I'm responding to the idea that this person is, somehow, wanting a good-faith discussion - he's not, he has a specific goal of shutting down the program.

If people would like to discuss this, they can at least discuss it for what it is - an attack on the program. Treat it as such. Don't hide behind "he just wants to talk".

There are, no doubt, many people who discuss Google's diversity programs every day on a good-faith basis. They don't need a manifesto in order to do so.
I work one hour or two every morning to pay the bills. I spend an additional 3-4 hours working on things I want to see happen in the world. The hardest part is self-discipline, so I cut out all social media (no reddit outside of work-related stuff and limit HN). No movies and no porn surfing.

No internet at home helps me stay on track. When I need internet I walk to the coffee shop with a to-do list.
I've always wondered how the bacteria in these highly acid/high temperature pools ever got started.
Thanks for the information, interested to see the results of those studies.
I read the whole thing out of curiosity since I'm often a target for witch-hunts myself after expressing unrelated unpopular views. I can't really see any reasons for being fired in the memo, except for the shame-and-punish-culture around these issues that he mentions. Not that I agree with everything, empathy is essential and a big part of adjusting towards a more humane and feminine world. But then he gets that part spot on, that becoming more feminine as a whole is a superior strategy to fitting more women inside a masculine framework by discrimination. The society we build has to provide space for all of us as individuals, not by making us all the same. You can't fix inequality by discrimination, why is this so difficult to understand?
Here is the very first empirical claim (other than describing the memo) in the scientists' responses:

> In 1960, the most common slurs were insulting labels for demographic groups. In 2017, the most common slurs involve labelling anyone who you disagree with on issues such as affirmative action, diversity, gaps, and inequality as a racist, sexist, homophobe, or bigot.

Citation? I suspect that this is wildly wrong, but unlike this scientist, I'd want to see the data first.
A appreciate it.

But, I don't really think the writer of this article is all that bad. He's obviously writing from a personal perspective. Basically narrating his "disilusionment," for lack of a better term. It's actually a fairly poor term. We always start from simpler idea, less knowledge and grow from there.

The reality is that there is no such things as patriotism. It's a made up concept to describe how we feel about our country (another made up concept). There is no True narrative of Turkey's political saga.

These are all opinions and narratives, subjective by nature. Facts play a roles, but they are intermingles with a lot of stuff that isn't factual in nature. That doesn't make it shallow.

The problem is that we're all playing a losing game. You can't read an article like this, and just fish for stuff that supports are weakens your own position in some meta-trial conducted in the minds of the whole world.
It isn't 100% fair, but the guy also stated that a systemic bias will likely create a negative (and one can conclude hostile) reaction rather than constructive discourse. It is safe to assume that if you can predict that there is likely to be a hostile reaction to your opinions due to context and systemic bias, there are other ways in which you might want to promote your ideas.

Advancing stereotypes aside, given that he knew that this was the case, he went ahead and published the article anyway rather than conduct private conversations on the topic or explore the discussion in other constructive ways.

Interestingly, he may have gotten a lot further in advancing constructive discourse by leaving it an open survey and reporting his findings on systemic bias. Rather than base his conclusions on his own naive assumptions, he could have conducted research and collect data from the internal Google employees and then reported his findings as objectively as possible.
M is the roman numeral for a thousand; MM is a common abbreviation for million, i.e. a thousand thousand.
Frankly I'm just annoyed that the way climate issues are presented is basically perfectly engineered to convince deniers that they're on to something.

I don't think there is much you can do once an issue has been associated with a particular political contingent.

Also if you think there isn't a smugness and high horsery from the other side then you are mistaken.
Hope you won't take it wrong sense but don't think not getting opportunity and being stereotyped because not part of cream layer is that much of a blessing :)
By the way the all the requirement of tier1 degree were found in startup job ads not just in big tech company jobs. Regarding the resource availability you are right but the problem is not about becoming skilled instead no one is ready to accept your skills if you don't have a tier1 college degree
I just learned about laptops from a Bay Area company yesterday: purism

HTTPS://puri.sm

Coreboot based laptops...
African Startups Are Increasingly Attractive to Investors
Looks good. Why do I have to sign up to your mailing list to continue though? I just want some random events.
It wasn't an internal memo.

Marked down for spreading alternative facts.
4 wives and a lover?
I think he knew what he was doing and correctly predicted reaction. If you have been following anti-SJW (for lack of better term) authors lately you can see exactly same pattern repeating over and over. After all he signed memo with his name. He could probably distribute it anonymously if he would want to keep his job. And if you ever tried to argue those points in any "left echo chamber" you probably know that before you convince anybody your account is banned.

SJWs (feminists, PC culture, LGBT, pro-Muslim, BLM, antifa...) when faced with more or less factual data that questions one of their sacred cows (women are equal to men, there are more than two genders, minorities need to be privileged, white privilege, institutional racism and patriarchy still exists...), they overreact with outrage with character assassination and shaming of meagerness. Some call this virtue signalling.

Example of this is how trump supporters are often labeled as nazis, racists, sexists...

While this works well in "echo chambers", it doesnt work as well in court. And I suspect that this guy had law suit for being fired and defamation.

This blog mentions that he already complained to NLRB:

> 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.

http://motls.blogspot.si/2017/08/james-damore-deserves-1-mil...
Sony Walkmans are selling like hotcakes again thanks to Guardians of the Galaxy
> If women get paid more for the same qualifications

Isn't that kind of the definition of the gender discrimination most companies are trying to avoid?
I think iteration and recursion can be defined perfectly well.

If people unconsciously create a more complex cycle, that might even be decomposable into distict smaller cycles, then thats still a perfectly fine recursion.

A program can apply both, recursion and iteration, together to solve a problem. Maybe the problem in the conversation is that it's context is implicit and inconsistent.

A recursive solution can always be written as an iterative one. Recursion is just a treat given by the language. There could be a language where any type of recursion on the language-function level is forbidden, but I doubt it would be terribly successful.
Actually caste isn't a binary classification. And reservations don't apply only to one caste. Many castes get reservations.

The remainder bulk of the people who don't get reservations fall into this category called 'General Merit'.

Now the system fills up the reservation quotas first, leaving leftovers to general merit. General merit has way more candidates and a larger section of people who score above reservation people. The net result is you end up denying top performers seats, so that you can fill reservation quotas.
How inconvenient.
Open Source FAQ Chatbot Builder – From NLP to Chatbot API's
Affirmative action in south Africa was a laughing stock. The country is in terminal decline riddled with corrupt people who have no business being in their positions. No appreciation of their positions and what ordinarily would be required to achieve the position. I will bet against any institution which implements affirmative action as a solution.
> How do you identify superstars?

Fun to be around if you're their boss, has a confident yet subtly incorrect opinion on every single aspect of programming, climate science, dietology and immigrants that are not them, personally stabbed one of the "weaklings" in the face, knows lots of GoT trivia, "weaklings" burned out while fixing their bugs.
Good for them.

The reality of modern war is that there isn't a lot of room beyond modern imperial proxy warfare in places like Syria and Afghanistan. WW3 in Europe means that most of Europe will be a smoking hole.
>You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case.

>it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.

I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts.

However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%.

I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply.

Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company.

Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%.

Not 50%.

Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.
It'll start getting really interesting once someone inevitably finds Airbnb users who've publicly proclaimed their hatred for whites, or men, or heterosexuals, or all of the above - because of course that's just as much a violation of the ToS but they'd basically be seen as alt-right supporters if they banned anyone for that. Definitely lose-lose.