skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What Happened to the Segment.com Open-Source Fellowships?
Does anyone know what happened to the Segment.com open-source fellowships?

They were offering 3-5 positions over the summer paying $8,000 a month to fund open-source projects.

https://open.segment.com/fellowship

https://segment.com/blog/segment-open-fellowship-2017

I had applied with one of my projects, but never got any response. Based on their blog, it appears that no open-source fellowships were ever awarded to anyone.

What is really bothering me about all this, is that I've now learned they will be soon be releasing a commercial product that is strongly related to the open-source project I submitted. At the time of submission, I gave them a lot of information about my project's design and future plans, which I believe they used to help develop their own commercial product.

I think that Segment needs to be socially responsible and actually deliver the promise they committed to. If they are going to use their "open-source fellowship" as a source of research and development, they should at least award SOMEONE the funds who is working on open-source.
I have a feeling even many of his detractors will be disturbed by this. Google made a mistake firing him so quickly. This really changed my view of Google to much worse.
On the contrary, being seen as ideologically homogenous isn't going to be good for a business that is meant to provide information to all of the world.

Google are edging ever closer to regulation, and when that happens their stock price will tumble.
I'm sorry, but citation needed. His activities were brought to light by others, and he was hounded for that. There was no report of his outside interests impacting anyone.
Yes, we should compassionately comfort those, who think their peers are actually inferior to them. Or else.
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Exactly. To wit: he thinks Google is hiring too many women. Yikes. Yeah, that'll get you fired, folks.
This assumes that talent and hiring is considered as a thresholded binary model, where you are either "good enough" or "not good enough" to work for the company, and the difference between two people who are "good enough" isn't important.

Of course, because of cultural and historical prejudices and biases, the pool of candidates that even apply to google is biased towards white males. Everything possible should be done to attract applications or seek out potential candidates from minority populations. But without suggesting any biological differences, it is still likely that because of cultural and historical prejudice, the distribution of talent among candidates will be skewed toward white males. Again, not because of any biological difference, but because they are more likely to have been encouraged or gone to rich universities or had parents who were engineers.

If we have a pool of 100 people and we want to hire the best five, then the bar is set by ranking the people by talent and qualification. If we want to hire everyone who is qualified, then wherever we set the bar, it is still likely that the population above the bar is skewed. So if we want to achieve a rebalancing or quota of employees from a certain sub-population, then it certainly does involve lowering the bar. We can argue over whether that is a good thing to want, or a fair thing, but I don't think you can logically argue that the bar isn't being lowered if you want to achieve a quota for a certain subpopulation. If you are suggesting that the population above the bar is not skewed, then you are suggesting that the terrible cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices against women and minorities in technical fields has had no effect on their ability to achieve talent and qualification above the level of the bar, which I find implausible.
Google's response recalls to mind Michael Scott's[1,2]:

"This is an environment of welcoming and you should just get the hell out of here."

[1] http://www.officequotes.net/no1-02.php
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg4QEIDgnc4&t=0m14s
Motherboard has a link to a version with all sources, that's the one I evaluated.

So it does, thank you. Yes, I agree that several of his claims could have used links to supporting evidence, in particular the bullet points under "These differences aren't just socially constructed". Not that the outcome would be any different.
So what you're saying is that gold is JavaScript - it got significant early adoption because the alternatives (like VBScript) were worse, and then that just amplified until it boosted it into an unassailable position. ;)
I understand all of that, but you put it in the context of Center/Right persons forming groups and finding employment with Center/Right Organizations

I do not see where that solves the discourse problem, all you end up with is a bunch of Authoritiarna Right companies in a Right Echo Chamber and a bunch of Authoritarian Left companies in a left Echo Chamber

The solution is to get back to promoting true free expression and the idea that "I disagree with what you have to say, but respect you for saying it"

Free Speech is under massive assault, but not from government but from societal sanction which is just as bad and just as dangerous

Societal sanction has a habit of becoming Government Censorship in short order
> He's implicitly claiming some of them shouldn't be there, or he believes that miraculously every single women at Google clears the bar for desirable traits in a programming without affirmative action. Come on now, which one do you think he believes?

He believes neither. We don't need to speculate, because the author writes quite deliberately to communicate his point. Here's the quote you're likely referring to, the one that mentions "lowering the bar":

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate. (emphasis mine)

The author is not stating that Google's hiring practices result in unqualified diverse candidates receiving offers at a higher rate than non-diverse candidates. The author is stating that a greater portion of qualified, non-diverse, are being rejected. In other words, the author is not stating that diverse employees at Google shouldn't be there. Rather he's claiming that there are a substantial number of non-diverse candidates who should have received offers, but didn't.
So much comes to mind:

* hate crime laws are institutionalized double jeopardy.

* much of kitchen hygiene are just rituals.

* early infanticide isn't so bad.

(Avoiding gender stuff because that's been done to death)
Google Fires James Damore for Writing Anti-Diversity Memo
We ban accounts that post uncivil, unsubstantive flamebait like this. Please stop.
There is no question that Google has discriminatory hiring practices. The only question is whether you think discrimination is a good thing. Apparently you do.
While it doesn't invalidate the takes, I'd like to point out that this is not exactly an unbiased selection of scientists. With the possible exception of David P Schmitt - the one with the relatively moderate take, whose research was cited in the original memo - they all appear to have at least mildly right-leaning political beliefs (see below). Also, the site Quilette itself is quite right-wing, as can be easily determined by looking at the homepage.

Lee Jussim: gave a "talk about left-wing bias in social psychology" http://quillette.com/2015/12/04/rebellious-scientist-surpris...

Geoffrey Miller: note wording of recent tweets, including

- Compare the actual Google memo to how it's being misrepresented by SJWs, and you'll see what's wrong in America.

- My new article for @QuilletteM: a new legal strategy the neurodivergent can use to fight for free speech on campus.

https://twitter.com/primalpoly?lang=en

and some earlier history that's just kind of bizarre:

https://closetpuritan.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/diversityisou...

Debra Soh: wrote a column complaining about censorship at colleges, claiming "emotional grievances are being prioritized over logic and facts", and uncritically praising a "free speech" event hosted by Ben Shapiro (of Breitbart fame) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/we-need-to-protect-f...
Do you think the letter was an attempt to deny people "fair civil rights"? If so, can you explain what "fair civil rights" are?
I'm not sure if you read his document, where he talks about Google having lowered the standards for its employees.

But I'll leave that to the side - there's no reason to think that many of the differences he describes aren't socially constructed. Maybe the way we raise women in America/the West turns them off to pursuing tech careers.

Until we can resolve this, it's ridiculous to use psychology studies to ascertain biology - and even afterwards, our goal should be ensuring access to well-paying careers, not remaining shackled to our biology.

As an example, we have trained runners to break previously 'impossible' race times through training, technology and science - we realize that what we thought was impossible was simply not compatible with the system we previously had in place.
I'm sorry, he did not tell his teammates they were hired because Google lowered the bar. Again, he's talking about on average differences and noting that the goal (50/50 representation) might not only be misguided but actively harmful. Why is this so controversial? He's talking about a process not individuals on his team or anywhere else at Google.
The Extropians (2005)
If they were serious about it (and not in a Jonathan Swift kind of way), perhaps. That said, it is difficult to see how it is equally harmful given how normal straight white men are in society.
How to Handle Viral Traffic on Your Website
I think the spirit of the memo even in that section is perfectly acceptable.

> Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these
differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything
about an individual given these population level distributions.

It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's not coming from someone unqualified.
All four state that there is strong evidence for of biological differences based on sex, though they all seem to come at it from different disciplines and support different claims. That's not, however, the same as saying that all four of them side with the author on his specific scientific claims.

In fact, all four of them conclude explicitly in favor of diversity initiatives.
If a non-progressive is alienated by a diversity program, are they not a racist or sexist?
IMHO, the first problem of summing a generalized array of numerical elements is not best solved recursively. I suggest sum(flatten( )) is better and uses less overhead. The subsequent problems under discussion more strongly require recursion.
Totally arm-chairing this here....

Adverse possession seems to require an element of you know, possession. No one possessed this property except the HOA until the nice couple bought it, and then their ownership has been the opposite of notorious because they didn't want to come into the light until they had their legal ducks in a row. If the couple had been paying the taxes for the last 30 years it might come under adverse possession. If this goes in favor of the couple without limit to whatever they want to do, it would be because the auction is unreservedly upheld. I basically agree that there is some chance that at least an easement will be found to exist in favor of the HOA. The tax collector did sit on their rights to the detriment of all, including a bit of degradation of the already weak reputation of tax collectors.
Python and MySQL/MariaDB. The queue is an in-memory table. Fair queuing is implemented as a big SQL SELECT statement.

The time scale is slow enough that polling it once a second for new work is sufficient. If it had to go fast, it would require something like a standard fair queuing implementation, where you hash the IP address and put the request onto 1 of N queues, serviced round-robin.
The link doesn't explain a thing about the science; in fact, the author states in the very first paragraph that he won't even bother. What exactly do you think you posted?

The manifesto's claims are very much in the scientific mainstream. Evidence has only piled on since the Pinker-Spelke debate. You have very little to hang your hat on in this argument.

[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...
What is the problem, though? Who says the uni/multiverse has a finite memory capacity? For more in this vein: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the-...
And if they do dig into the inner workings of the hiring process and the results are still not representative of the general population? Do you just assume you've somehow managed to eliminate all bias and the results must reflect the population? Or do you assume that you haven't managed to 100% debug this highly difficult process?

It is very difficult to tell the difference between biased hiring and actual skew in the population. But when it's a trait that has no obvious connection to the job, it seems best to assume the process is biased, unless really good evidence exists to demonstrate a connection.

For example, let's say your interview process produces hires whose heights are substantially above average. If you're hiring for a basketball team then this would make perfect sense. If you're hiring Java programmers, it's highly likely that your interview process is screwed up. It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions.

Obviously, the first thing to do is to examine your interview process and eliminate any source of height bias you can find. But what if you do that and you're still hiring an abnormally large number of tall people? You could take this as sufficient evidence that tall people are better at this, but that's putting an awful lot of confidence in your interview program. It's more likely that you just haven't found all the sources of tall bias. If that's the case, then pushing for more short hires will improve the overall quality of your hires because you won't be artificially excluding good short ones.
Brendan Eich got fired from his CEO position for the offense of privately and silently donating a few thousand dollars to a PAC which was against prop 8.

The above sentence is a fact but I am compelled to write it with a throwaway account since even mentioning the idea that this may have been unfair puts my career at risk. That's how bad it's gotten.
Well, I can tell you were NOT to have that discussion: publicly at work.

That said, as a white man myself, I would argue very strongly that I am not being "persecuted".

Synonyms for this word include: oppress, abuse, victimize, ill-treat, mistreat, maltreat, tyrannize, torment, torture; martyr.

I've never felt any of the above.

As a white english-speaking immigrant I've never been accosted about my status. I've never been given shit for being an illegal immigrant. I've never been given crap for "stealing American jobs" (and for the record, I am now a US citizen, no arrests, tax-paying, picket fence).

But I see it very often to legal non-white immigrants.

So you think YOU or your race/gender has been persecuted? You (like me) have no idea what that truly means.
Holding an opinion isn't a firing offense. The firing offense is violating the agreements he signed as an employee (the most obvious poor decision here being the choice to post his manifesto on corporate services using corporate equipment).
The irony of this post when you will get reported and hellbanned for questioning libertarianism on HN. As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.

I'd wager good money I'm a lot closer to that Conrad character than the author will ever be and from where I'm sitting it's pretty clear that tech culture has started becoming completely toxic. The article reads as if written by a psychopath (and one begins to wonder whether Evgeny Morozov has a point about SV's movers and shakers). Putting aside the shallow and barely informed notions about fashion and art themselves, dismissing morality as no more than a seasonal fad or craze is itself an unwitting confession of a deep-seated amorality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism
Big Five is standard in psychology. It should not be confused with personality quizzes on the internet. Big Five scores are reproducible (two tests at different time give similar score) and predictive (correlate with outcomes of interest). Its place in psychological metrics is second only to IQ.
No, I believe the author did that when he said that diversity programs alienate non-progressives.
> And the very idea that you have celebrity crushes while you claim you're in love with someone flies in the face of the idea of love.

How so? This is where you lose me.
He argues that Google should end diversity programs. The document doesn't just poorly summarize social psych and sociology research, but uses it to justify a proposed change in company practice and culture that would perpetuate the status quo.

In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document. Anybody could tell you that a lot of people would be hurt by this document, regardless of its scientific merit. As such, it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right". Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
Ah, but in a socialist society you then get a new home, because the entire population is in the mandatory risk insurance pool for that, effectively.

(Quality of said homes is a different and orthogonal question.)
I suspect this getting up-voted is about the Google engineer's diversity essay. How about instead of framing it in terms of what you can't say politically, let's rephrase it another way:

Imagine you make a post inside your company Slack complaining all your colleagues are stupid and unqualified. You'd probably be reprimanded right?

Didn't that guy basically just do that but only about his female and minority colleagues (and future female and minority colleagues)? Don't we all monitor our words at least a bit at work for the sake of the day going smoothly?

And if he's so correct about Google's diversity initiatives being a problem and/or failure why doesn't he start a company that only hires men to take advantage of the market inefficiency in hiring (if you say hiring laws would get in the way, when is the last time a company paid a serious price for failing to have diverse hires)?

The most upvoted HN comments on threads about the diversity manifesto reek of protecting the status of the people already at the top. And are as flimsy and irrational as they claim the liberal values they decry are. White men have traditionally been in power in this country and suppressed the rights of women & minorities to vote, educate themselves & work for years. How can we know that another group wouldn't be historically more powerful without a control group study where each group is allowed to be a historical oppressor for an equal amount of time?
> Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"?

He uses the phrase "effectively lower the bar" to mean something very different from what almost all of us think of as lowering the bar. The full quote is that one of Google's "discriminatory practices" is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."

That is, the bar isn't lowered, they're just trying to fail to hire qualified candidates (from certain groups) less than they currently do.

Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.
The pool of candidates are men and women who want to work in tech. I have no metrics of this pool but I think that most probably is something like 75/25 (if someone can provide better metrics I appreciate it). So the bigger the company the most probably it get closer to this ratio. What companies want to achieve with gender diversity is 50/50 because in the world the proportion is 50/50. But this is not the case for the pool of candidates. So moving far from 75/25 it only make you not hiring the best candidates (because the best candidates pool should be something similar to 75/25 if we assume a normal distribution for both genders).

I don't think it is bad you have a company with a ratio 75/25 but I would think why are less women than men interested in tech. Is it based on biology? is it a cultural issue? We can discuss that, but for me it is clear that a positive discrimination to have a 50/50 ratio it only harms the company in the long term and it an impossible goal to achieve now a days.

> Even if their hiring pool of candidates didn't have a fully diverse distribution, that doesn't automatically make it okay to have a company that ranks poorly on diversity

So, how do you achieve this diversity?
People definitely agreed on Blind (you can find screenshots of those posts in news articles), and Google employees made comments of this sort on memegen and g+ all the time. He was foolish enough to post a manifesto using company equipment, violating all sorts of different parts of the agreement he signed when he joined the company.

There are lots of conservatives at Google (and other SV tech companies) who agree with the author, and most of them aren't going to lose their jobs because they have the common sense not to get themselves fired for no reason.
Actually, I may be thinking of another program other than TREASUREMAP.
CSU Eliminates Math Requirement to Boost Graduation Rates
What if my grievance is with the people / culture at work?
Umm. I think you should actually read it :)