skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A monumental failure of PR would've been Google getting sued for gender discrimination if this guy was ever put in charge of a mixed-gender team and someone in the team thought they were being put at a disadvantage.

This guy clearly wanted to stir controversy, that's why the memo kept doing the rounds (he says he submitted it to several diversity groups inside of google himself.) I doubt he would've put up with having a "sensible discussion" with Google HR and let it go.
For the amount of business Amazon gives USPS/UPS/FedEx, you would think their APIs could show Amazon that a package with a given tracking number matches the address for the order.
Pretty soon, we'll see the new consulting offering from McKinsey: Vector-based Budgeting. Very useful helping to mathematically quantify your various business unit's planning cycles in infinite dimensional space. You thought ZBB was cool, VBB is even cooler.
He says that if 10% of men and 8% of women are suitable for tech, and google hires unbiased from suitable people, then google should expect a 55:45 gender gap.

That doesn't mean that the female colleagues are unsuitable for tech, since they were exactly hired among people who were suitable.

He is also not saying that this explains the complete gender gap, just that there is no point in blindly aiming at 50:50 without considering research on the underlying distribution.

He may have the research wrong, but otherwise the point seems to stand?

EDIT: Of course, this argument only works for a binary 'suitable/not suitable' distinction. If 'tech talent' was said to be normal distributed, with men having a slightly higher expectation, it would follow that the average men above some cut was also better than the average woman above the same cut. So in that way he does attack his colleagues.
The intentional blurring of the difference between "individuals" and "group averages" is out of control.

Here some quotes from the essay that underscore this distinction:

> 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.

> 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).
As someone who sells on Amazon (just used books and whatnot), the third-party system is great when everyone's honest. I can sell a $40 book for $15 used because otherwise it's just collecting dust, the buyer can easily find the item and shop among third-party sellers. (since my item gets organized under the main amazon search result, vs. ebay where every item is totally seperate)

The big issue is scammers ruining it for everyone
I'm being persuaded by personal experience. I haven't actually been the victim of any fraud on Amazon, but the other problems with third-party sellers are already enough to make me shy away.
While I think a reasonable rebuttal to the memo could be made, the assumptions at the beginning of this article are so obviously missing the point of the memo that it's hard to see justifying reading the rest of it. Many people do make those assumptions, but I don't think you can honestly parse the original memo and believe that it was truly biased by, or literally promotes, those ideas.
Neuroticism isn't a vague insult. It's a specific technical term in psychology and is one of the Big Five personality traits—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism

People want Damore to have written a PhD level thesis for an internally circulated document but most haven't themselves done even a basic Wikipedia level research before bringing out the pitchforks.
Appreciate the addition to the conversation, but since it doesn't say anything about efficacy in engineering, I'm afraid it's just noise.
(And that empty type is the one named by the symbol nil.)

The nil type is useful at run-time because it constitutes the bottom of the type spindle: just like in set theory the empty set is a subset of every set, including itself, the type nil is a subtype of every type, including itself.

This can be used at run-time; e.g. (subtypep nil 'integer) -> t.

We can't just exclude this value from the type domain on the grounds that it's static only. "Sorry, you don't get a bottom plug on your type spindle at run time ...". :)
The point of diversity isn't to force everyone to think men and women are identical in every capacity. The point of diversity is to create a desired environment with different kinds of people.
Easy. Imagine a company that hires only people at least 6'1'' tall (1.85 for us Europeans). The employees genders ratio would be skewed towards males.
You could argue that there are biological differences that make the number of suitable female hires smaller, and you would be right.
Does that make your female colleagues shorter? Not at all. They are and remain, as all other employees, at least 6'1''.
The problem is this bullshit game of business as you described. Soundcloud shouldn't need that kind of headcount or costs. We need new models of business that lock out the existing shareholder and management classes and their toxic thinking in favor of a structure that is far more equitable and hierarchically flat. Soundcloud is and was only ever for the users. A small power group (headcount-wise) trying to monetize SC will always be doomed to fail.

So many beautiful ideas are destroyed by the greed and avarice that underpins 'fiduciary duty to shareholders' and their expectations of unnatural and unhealthy growth.
Constructive criticism, speaking out against wrong isn't gossip.
Exactly. People just fail to think in the shoes of Google, the company. They don't gain anything by keeping him there. Getting rid of him and preparing for a few weeks of unwanted scrutiny is the best thing they can do.
I have. it grossly underestimates.

a while ago, this and other sites said I needed 120k in LA and 140k in SF to maintain my south america 40k.

turns out I moved making more than the SF salary in LA. and it still falls short on what I have money to do on short trips and night life.

I guess it is acurate if you dont go out every friday and saturday and never, ever leave the city for the longer holidays.
It would be nice to have a complete timeline of the memo's life.

My guess of the sequence of events is:

1. First sent to the groups in charge of diversity: "I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google"

2. Their reply was something along the line of "thanks, but no thanks": "mostly I was ignored"

3. He forwards the memo to a wider group? (My guess)

4. The memo goes viral inside and outside Google

5. Execs have no option but to fire him under the internal and external pressure

If my guess is correct it, I don't think Google execs were left with a choice. There is a time, place and way to discuss controversial topics.

If on the other hand (3) didn't happen or it was not done by Damore, then Google does seem to not be able to tolerate different opinions and does have a problem indeed.
This was briefly on the frontpage but now I can't find it listed on HN. Did this violate some kind of rules?
Same here! If I'm going to have the hassle of dealing with random unknown sellers, I might as well do it with the company that specializes in it.
I would say the description makes it appear to be an actual photographer, although that's very easily duplicated from somewhere else. Also, Amazon is usually very good about protecting buyers from scams.
this journalist should resign. Sundar is right.
I have read it, though I can't find where he calls for scientific debate (or any kind of debate) rather than reeling off a list of points with more Wikipedia links and popsci articles than someone with research skills should know not to put in. I just realised how comical the little table of "left biases" and "right biases" is, even if he does try to hedge out the unfounded categorisations with "it's not 100% accurate".
There's several holes with buyer side fraud as well with Amazon. Similar issues where common sense things are ignored by Amazon.

Mentioned because I think it's the case that they just don't care about anyone...versus, for example, being biased towards sellers.
Zero Hour for Generation X
Again, what should he apologize for?

You seem to really want him to repent for something. What is it?
The title of the article seems incorrect. No one person has a complete picture of what is underground in NYC, but everything is accounted for somewhere.

One thing not addressed in the article is how that map is kept up to date. Work is constantly happening in the city and any map will decay with time. It is likely a full time job keeping the map current.
Especially that few scientists are on record saying that the memo is solid on science, and the quoted research is not only not debunked, but also not even controversial in sociological circles.
Depends. At a strictly transactional cost it is probably 20+ hours of effort all told to use small claims court.

I think there is more at play here, though. They wrote a blog post and have clearly been wronged. Holding Amazon accountable is one of the only ways to change their behavior. It is like fighting a speeding ticket. Some shockingly high percentage are never contested. People just take their lumps and move on. So, I think at this level it is a big enough dollar figure that (aside from the calendar time) it is probably worth your actual time too. If it wasn't they probably wouldn't have written a blog post anyway, if 1500 was that inconsequential to them.
I'm not sure if you could or not, however if you were a scammer, you would probably not duplicate cards across accounts. If one account was banned, they would likely ban all accounts with same credit card, thereby wasting all that effort to starting multiple accounts.
Author of the article here.

That's primarily the reason why there are no "concrete examples", because one person's concrete example is another person's definition of contrived. Splitting hairs over some toy example wasn't something I thought would buttress the ideas presented, though I can imagine why some might need that scaffolding to follow along.

Re resting - here are some points the article makes about how smaller functions can in some cases hurt testing:

1) "Furthermore, when the dependencies aren’t explicit, testing becomes a lot more complicated into the bargain, what with the overhead of setting up and tearing down state before every individual test targeting the itsy-bitsy little functions can be run."

Disambiguating this for you, one of the myths of smaller functions is that they are easier to test. The article makes the claim that this isn't always true, because many who wax lyrical about the beauty of smaller functions also champion for fewer arguments to be passed to the function. The book Clean Code very explicitly states this (read the book, not as a how to guide but as a cautionary tale), and many a time what I've seen happen in the wild (especially in Ruby) is that programmers who like small functions and don't like making deps explicit - which then means the code (and ergo tests) rely on setting up shared global state.

Of course one can write smaller funcs with fewer args and not do this, but that's not the point here. The main argument is that making functions smaller doesn't always make it easier to test.

The article also does provide two examples when having the smallest possible function does help in testing. I'm not going to rehash those arguments again here.
>You can't arbitrarily say that the line stops at one thing

I never said that or implied that. You misinterpreted. It makes zero sense to bring up rape when talking about this Google manifesto. I do think sexism and racism occur in the tech industry. However, not comparable in extremity to rape. This trivializes the experiences that rape victims actually do face. I'm not a moderator of course, so say what you want. But it makes your talking points looking appear ridiculous and nonsensical. Perhaps, your comments would be more relevant in the Binary Capital case.
I'd hope that checking the address would be part of the procedure for asserting that the package was delivered to the correct address. If not the first time through, it surely should at least be part of the appeal process.
AFAIK, he didn't claim one group of people had less aptitude for working there. Could you cite where exactly he said that?
Not sure what you mean, because plenty of people lambasting him ARE indeed lambasting him over the suggestion that it's incorrect to insist that anything short of a 50-50 gender ratio at Google is because of discrimination against women.

Of course they are not lambasting him in those words (that would be charitable). They are saying ridiculous nonsense like "Google employee claims women are inferior than men" or "Google employee claims women are not suited to be software engineers".
Amazon cannot stock everything. 3p sellers exist because they are more efficient than Amazon in their specific niches.
Can you cite where Damore explicitly states that? Or are you just regurgitating second hand information that was processed by a blogger that didn't read the memo?
Should be paired with http://monster6502.com/ :-)
Yes, but my guess is that with CRISPR we will be able to do DNA editing and experiments much faster. Then slowly, but much faster than in the past, we will be able to figure out, first cut, what some segment of DNA does what and, second-cut, some of the more complicated ways DNA works.

Then applications to agriculture, medicine, etc. might come along in a nice stream.

Still, of course, it stands to be a very long line of work to figure out much about how DNA causes a human actually to "work".
James Damore: Why I Was Fired by Google
Well, you could subscribe to their service. As a premium member you get stream links for plain high-bitrate MP3/AAC streams - no Flash, no DRM, not even a webbrowser required.
IMHO opinion, this shouldn't even be necessary.

I use ad-blockers in every browser and I would have no problem if that were part of the headers my browser emits ( have no idea if it is or not). If websites don't want to serve me because I'm blocking ads, so be it.
First data transmission through terahertz multiplexer reported
Read this http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/technology/founders-of-web...
I guess we will have to agree to disagree that these programs he allocated cutting mitigate this gap.

Isn't down voting my opinions evidence that Hacker News doesn't tolerate diverse opinions? Where is the outrage at that?
looking at you, Lua ...
The memo literally lists the biological/psychological traits of men and women that may have caused the gender gap in tech. (He tries to clarify that he is talking on a population level and not talking about individuals)
Did you read the thing? It was very clearly about statistics. The message of the memo was not "women are biologically unfit for tech," it was, as a biological tendency, women are more likely to have traits which disincline them to have an interest in tech-related things, and therefore end up in tech.

To me this says very obviously that women can and are intellectually superior to men on individual cases. But we would not expect an even 50/50 distribution of tech interest among genders.

Feel free to refute that as a separate claim, but if your take from the memo was "all women are biologically inferior and cannot match or be better than men," then I would say you were not being intellectually honest when reading it.
Acidente de trem no Egito deixa mortos e feridos
But presumably Amazon wouldn't send an empty box to the wrong address through Prime. You still have to worry about commingling, but it is still much better than straight third-party sales.
> an explanation from a sociology researcher how he incorrectly jumped to conclusions

Here’s an explanation of 4 different psychology / neuroscience researchers. They all say the science is OK in that memo:

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
ah yes. the great union collective fear that was masterly imbued in the mind of every middle class american.

even down to the point of dictionaries now listing syndicate as organised crime. yes, there was some cases. but steve jobs also was convicted of organized crime literally on wages fixing and he never made it into a dictionary as a synonym to organized crime like they did to unions.
Slightly off-topic, but for a good bit of fun on the USPIS, you should watch the TV Show "The Detour" ;-)
Man everyone's a victim nowadays?
I don't, and I'm pretty baffled that it does affect em units for text-zoom (despite the two having very similar purposes).

Perhaps the difference is that with min font sizes everything gets clamped, which can make two objects of different sizes get the same size if they used em units (if em units affect things). Which is both good and bad, depending on the intent. (Whereas with text-zoom everything is nicely scaled so it's less of a problem).
I think the argument would be that, say, the New York Times wrote an article, and that article included ads for their sponsor. This third party tool is making unauthorized edits to the New York Times' copyrighted material.

I'm a hardline free speech dude, but I find it difficult to justify "We changed around your copyrighted work to remove stuff we decided we don't like." If you don't like ads, pay up or go elsewhere. You do not have a right to anybody else's IP.
> Everybody can flag (just click in the x minutes ago link and you'll see that post as top leveel including a link to flag it).

Thanks for pointing that out. My apologies to @dang, then.

Having said that, that's a pretty lame feature to have, considering that there's no way to see what the flagged comment was. For posterity, this is what I said:

"I never switched anything. The conclusion that "there aren't as many high-IQ women" comes from "there is a higher variance in the distribution of male intelligence". It's been there from the beginning.

You have to actually follow the links I give and pay attention during reading."
open a command prompt as "admin" (run as admin), and type:

powercfg -h off

this will give you your total ram amount back in extra disk space. You'll lose hibernation support.
> it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

This is why what Damore did is important and why having the discussion is important. People like you either mistakenly believe this or are being deliberately manipulative and misleading by claiming the science is settled. In fact, the science is not settled, and if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor. That you and people like you want to believe one thing very much is not a substitute for the actual truth to the rest of us, and never will be.
Is Hacker News deeply rooted in Silicon Valley, and isn't it well known that Silicon Valley do not share conservative views? I think the answer can be derived herein.
The content you are sending them "new featured books" sounds like it's going to be not hugely interesting for most people. Maybe try to create really engaging content around the original means of signing up (was it book specific) and you'll probably find sponsors around that relevant content.

What do you think?
Does it have to be addressed?

It went largely ignored for months. I suspect the reason this went viral was the offended parties recirculated it amongst themselves.

If the explosion is the problem, consider the gunpowder, as well as the spark.
>At my recent companies, I've even seen senior developers, people with fancy degrees and 200k+ salaries, write code that's horrendously hard to understand and maintain, because it's endlessly duplicated and squashed into a single long function.

Ever wondered that they might be senior and commanding those salaries because they think and program a certain way? Have you ever discussed this with them? Many senior developers tend to shy away from abstractions in my experience, and they do it for a reason.
The willful misrepresentation of the memo is one of the reasons he got more support than usual. Most people who argued on the scientific basis mostly concurred and a few disagreed. There is nothing "overly debunked".
Good Day Uber PR. From the outside, this looks like investors siding with money over prior relationships. The existing Uber direction and leadership have taken far too few prisoners, and the money begins to talk.
You know, I had no idea that was a thing... Thanks for the info, I'll go look into that.

Last I looked at jQuery was a few months ago, and all I saw was standard or compat.

EDIT: Just looked it up, it's still pretty big for my tastes, but I appreciate any reduction in size. Next time I need to bring in jQuery I'll see if I can get away with just slim.
I never get tired of this.
Intelsat 708 Disaster
believe his actions, not his words
He handled the situation poorly IMO. Didn't consider the consequences of what he was saying true or not and didn't present it in an appropriate way for how sensitive the issue was. Ultimately that's a self defeating way to get your points across.

Showing up to a photo shoot in a Goolag shirt also just undermines him as a person. It's totally hyperbolic and ridiculous and will further discredit him in other people's minds because it's an insane overreaction to make that comparison.
on fortune 500, you move teams often (managers and vp quit and new ones join in, there are layoffs, reorgs, etc) and the people above you give you work based on first impressions. they will need to have you in their org for some 4 years to learn something from your resume.
Discussion from 4 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948392
Why I'm not a fan of pair programming
They think about it a great deal, especially ones like Bitcoin with finite money supply that will become less and less accessible over time as people die or lose their keys. Ethereum for example built a money supply algorithm that adds a set amount of currency every year, resulting in an eventual equilibrium where the % of total money supply lost per year = % of total money supply added. This has been on peoples' minds since the early days.
Agreed, but she exploited their algorithms which is definitely something 'frauds' do. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing, it's working for her. She shouldn't feel bad but she shouldn't feel like a genius either.
They're also (currently?) running a competition for distribution of radio bandwidth amongst peers using ML, iirc
>if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor.

This isn't true.
isnt disruption the whole point of Silicon Valley?

Capitulating due to media pressure, if that is the reason, is extremely weak leadership and only made the problem worse.
>The responsible thing to do for your job is to fix the problem that is immediately threatening the company.

The problem is double talk. They pretend that they want open discussion and provide an internal forum for it, but when someone like Damore takes them up on it they see it as a problem. If you don't want controversy don't pretend that you do.
> If they want higher quality they can ask me or hear it when I play out.

But that would defeat the purpose of streaming services: convenience.

> IIRC, there is a 'allow high-quality streaming for logged in users' checkbox in the upload editor

Maybe for pro users. I just uploaded a file and didn't see that option.
it's a 'student initiated course. MIT and I believe other colleges offer them -

https://registrar.stanford.edu/staff/student-initiated-cours...