skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The situation is more dire than that link suggests.

It isn't just that some people are too emotionally reactive to be directly involved in a reasonable conversation.

We are currently shutting down even the possibility of a conversation among any set of a large group of people, because some people in that group are uncomfortable with it.

They aren't even willing to sit out the conversation that makes them uncomfortable, they are insisting that nobody else be allowed to have the conversation within the larger community.
> That's not a good source.

There are no other sources. Everything else is marketing and tweets.

So, by the only actual existing data, Tesla is far behind most other carmakers.
This argument reminds me of the "waterboarding is not torture" argument, both suffer from slothful induction fallacy.

If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't?

Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
The electoral college has less to do with it than the fact that our electoral system is first-past-the-post.
I think the discrepancy between American women and immigrant women is interesting. I'm not sure we can conclude from the given evidence that the difference is reduced impediments. It could be that that the increased economic opportunity (or potential immigration benefits) makes up for other things.
It's not the quality, it's the intent. He went for an adversarial debate, not a discussion.

The memo reads as him knowingly and intentionally starting a fight. My assumption, from reading the memo, was that he was expressing an opinion he knew to be controversial, knew would upset people, but wanted to make a point of proving he was right anyway in the face of those upset people. It reads a lot like the vaguely provocative way people write about such things on twitter/reddit/here.

In a work environment, that approach can and will get you fired. It should cause you career problems even if you do it for mundane things like type theory, or memory management, or distributed systems. Do it on something controversial and cause a huge problem for the company, and of course they are going to fire you. Especially since in this context adversarial = hostile work environment.
I can't speak to Google's hiring policy, but affirmative action indeed gives preference to underrepresented minorities at the expense of more qualified people on the basis of gender/race. If you want quantitative data, just look at test scores of underrepresented minorities vs white/Asian men at competitive high schools and universities.

You can sugar coat it all you want, but it's still discrimination on the basis of gender/race.
That doesn't account for the cultural pressure on girls throughout childhood to be princesses, like pink things and cooking and babies and ponies, while boys are supposed to like computers and engineering and guns.

We're still preparing girls to stay home, cook dinner and have babies while the men go out and earn the money.
If female engineers need to worry that, in the aftermath of the memo, people will wonder their genuine qualifications, they should not aim their blame toward the memo. The only people overtly and explicitly injecting non-qualification factors into hiring are affirmative-action type people. They created the quandary.
These things are talked about at the workplace, however. Just around the water cooler in private rather than out in the open. It is getting super weird and awkward these days where many people claim to adhere to the accepted diversity story in public but obviously don't in private.
3rd parties get trotted out every time someone loses an election by a few percentage points. The facts are, that viewed against 2012, the right wing third party candidates gained more votes than the left wing. Ie. the demographics of the 3rd party votes helped Clinton more than they hurt her.
'Tis I.

It gave me an excuse to create an account.
Some of them put their product on the market, but quietly.

One company I've been watching closely which at the same time has been secretive to say the least:
http://www.amprius.com/
Their product is a li-ion battery with a silicon anode and apparently it works, because they put it into an actual device:
http://www.imei.info/phonedatabase/79823-bluboo-x550/ (Note the massive 5Ah battery)

These guys generated quite a buzz back in the day:
https://oxisenergy.com/
For now their product is sort of disappointing, but the lone fact that they harnessed this new chemistry is notable.

Last but not least IMO the most promising company among them all:
https://www.eosenergystorage.com/
I remember when they were promising 6MWh/1MW stacks and 10k cycles instead of the 4MWh/1MW stacks with a lifespan of 5k cycles they are offering now, but the key thing is they are deploying them as we speak - actually, their total production for 2017 was sold out at the start of this year.

These 1MWh stacks are made from 12kWh modules, which sooner or later will be offered to individual customers.
edit: ah, nevermind, just a reference that went over my head
> Imagine for a second you have imposter syndrome. Now imagine that you've been told (not necessarily by Damore) that you're the (not quoting you here) "diversity hire". Imagine how much worse that imposter syndrome now is.

I've actually heard where this exact thing has happened at Google, in a very high profile team. This isn't just a hypothetical, it's a reality.
He said PC_authoritarians are violent. Not leftists.
I live in the land of prestigious doctors - we all did well on the SAT. CS was not super prominent in my life despite me knowing some code in early high school, but my mom is a doctor, so that was obviously a viable option in my mind. The thought that it is a job that only lasts until you are 45 and I have to make as much money as I humanly can before being forced to retired at middle age is a bit unattractive. Also, the idea of doing stuff on computer all day looking for bugs, vs playing medicine puzzles was less attractive. LOL, medicine is fairly tedious as well now that I am in it, but yes, while I am more interested in programming to do a few practical things, I am not interested in working as a SWE. A lot of the med students have SWE spouses. We do sit around and lament about how we could have done it too with much better pay and some passes for interviewing, about the Google Hawaii powow and how nice the Christmas party as Museum of Natural History is, while we get a Christmad party at the local bar with the drunk emergency technicians. Tech has a lot of glamour now, medicine doesn'.t But in the end, I don't think I would choose differently. Female physicians really don't get any passes... Okay, if you are lady going into Urology or trauma surgery, and a dude going into obgyn, I hear there is a bit more help, otherwise we don't really get any bonus points for being a woman or minority.
I indulge in precisely as much assholery as I want: Zero.

If you want to indulge in more, that's sad, but don't project that desire onto anyone else.
> he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way

So very much this. He presented very few facts and a tiny bit of cherry-picked research. He decided to tackle a big-boy subject with a sixth-grader's game.

Pro-tip: Don't dress up your opinions as fact.
Pro-tip #2: Don't tackle large or sensitive topics with an air of authority
Pro-tip #3: When addressing your colleagues find people who disagree with you or question you and incorporate their feedback.

#3 is the most difficult step. If you perform true self-reflection it can often lead to abandonment of the argument you were attempting to make because you realize you were wrong or simply that you don't know much about the topic.

> there is something about computer science that leads people to believe they can out-think experts in other fields at their own game.

This is very common among many fields of expertise. Go ask any physicist at your local university about crank papers claiming to have overturned Einstein (and possibly all of science). First of all they'll have a drawer full of them. Secondly you'll see over half are written by someone with an engineering degree.
That was a cool read. Thank you.
I strongly agree. The double-standard is remarkable though. Merely questioning the liberal position with less than a perfect rhetorical command is nearly criminal, but if you endorse a liberal position, you can be incorrect and even downright hateful toward your position, and lots of respectable (sometimes powerful) people will defend you against any criticism. I always catch a lot of flak for calling out liberal advantages (I'm a moderate liberal, for whatever that's worth), but pretending they don't exist hasn't exactly been doing wonders for the tone of our political discourse either.
The paper is really two papers. The first paper is a thoughtful and careful explanation of how we should consider judging pseudorandomness, and how to measure various criteria, along with a survey of many popular ten-lines-or-less PRNGs which PCG competes with. I found it interesting.
So she completely disagrees with sociology as an academic discipline?

That's just all sorts of crazy/anti-intellectualism
>the "switch" that supposedly happened in response to the Democrats changing some of their positions

But no one argued that. No one argued that the Democrats changed so the Republicans said "oh man, guess we have to switch too". It was a gradual shift over decades to the point where Democrats are now the civil rights party when they used to be the pro-slavery party and the Republicans are now the party of holding back civil right progress when they were literally willing to start a war to abolish slavery.

Setting aside the one point that literally only you are arguing, I'm glad we've come to the point where we can realize that we actually do agree. Our only disagreement is that you think the word "switch" implies a sudden and coordinated effort to flip places.

Democrats and Republicans, through decades of policy shifts, now represent views they have historically been against. The point of that is "the party of Lincoln" and "the party of Reagan" is Republican in name only, not in actual policy, and the Democrats surely are not the pro-slavery party anymore.
AMD Radeon RX Vega Block Chain Driver Tested Shows Solid Ethereum Mining Gains
Exactly. One of the biggest wastes of time I incurred last week was trying to argue with someone here who wouldn't specify what the memo said, but would deny anything I said about it with "but he never said that!" It went on for days.
Hype? You can use it today, for free. It is operating and 100% open source.

https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite
Unclear, but you might find it interesting to look up the actual residency requirements of various PhD programs you respect.
> It matters whether it's actually correct, and actually refers to real things.

You're completely missing my point.

Replace the quoted sentence with "Suppose you already have an actually correct morality that refers to real things". The computational intractability argument remains a damning condemnation of consequentialism. Just because you can state the theorem doesn't mean you can find the witnessing construction.

> Then stop talking about morality already

Just because things are socially constructed doesn't mean they aren't valuable, and it also doesn't mean that they have no effect on our lives.

> There's no point in spending massive sums of effort, money, and even military manpower on made-up constructions if you know damn well they're made up.

Why not?

Why can't we just say some things are "self-evident" and worth fighting for?

And if this is true, then why are moral considerations such potent rhetorical devices? The only possible explanation I can think of is extraordinarily condescending.

> I'm a moral realist

Now I'm even more confused.

First, the realists play this game all the time; each branch of moral realism basically corresponds to a different -- usually embarrassingly pseudo-scientific -- way of justifying a priori ethical concerns.

From my perspective, moral realism isn't an escape from the problem; it's just a way of ignoring the actually hard problem and playing games that are completely parametric in the actually hard problems.

Second, the view of morality as a social construction isn't even inconsistent with moral realism as long as you're willing to go past whatever nice distinctions make for easy-to-grade multiple choice exams in PHIL 101. E.g., one plausible (and, per usual, embarrassingly pseudo-scientific) hypothesis bridging this divide is that morality is a social construction that necessarily arises from ethical intuitions that have a physiological basis.
I've always known Product Owners and Product Managers to basically be people who got the role because they wanted to be in tech but couldn't/wouldn't write code. IMHO, those are really non-technical roles for which you are probably already overqualified. But in the end, it depends on how the company defines those roles.
If the price is determined by how much someone is willing to buy or sell for, how do you determine the price when there are no trades being made?

How does simply deciding 1 bitcoin is worth $1b effect the value of bitcoin if no one is willing to buy at that price?
Hostile work environments are created because of impact, not intent. It doesn't really matter what you meant to do if your actions made thousands of women feel diminished in the workplace.

I also don't think Damore's totally naive when it comes to diversity issues. He did a lot of research and evidently even discussed his concerns with HR. I think it's pretty clear he knew what he was getting into.
I don't feel that allowing them to dox themselves legitimizes their movement. Besides in terms of being pragmatic, it's nice for the authorities to easily know what they are thinking every day and where they happen to be. That's valuable intel. That's harder to have in a closed web.
IIRC, some people say the opposite - that as standards of living and gender equality improve, lower proportions of women go into Engineering - which is why Iran, Zimbabwe, Thailand etc have >40% female representation in coding classes while Sweden, New Zealand, Canada etc are <30%.
"If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it ..."

This applies to any sort of interrogation tactic along the spectrum between The Comfy Chair and Execution. Each step would not be applied if the detainees confessed at the next-below step.
As a very busy individual, I have to manage the amount of time I spend reading things provided through sites such as HN. If I did not monitor or control the time spent on these sites I would never get the things done that are high priorit. It is simply too easy to be drug down rabbit trails through endless links, etc.

Reaching for the sake of business/work is a requirement in and of itself that I can only control to a point. However, I do not allow myself to be sent down trails unless it is for the sake of product improvement, skills enhancement, etc.
Alright:

A forward: Grant is a professor of Economics at Wharton, and Scott is a Psychiatrist and author of a popular blog - both agree that biological differences in ability are small (for the field of CS at large).

Scott contends:

> It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality ... become (aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities ...)

Concomitantly, those countries display the worst gender imbalance in CS graduates while the countries with poor GDI do well on their ratios! Outright discrimination does not look plausible. Maybe its just socialization?

Scott looks backwards in time. Only 20% of high school students who take AP CS are women... which is about the number of US CS graduates. You can trace roughly equal numbers (in terms of interest) back to middle school and even earlier... and even to Rhesus monkeys apparently! However,

> One subgroup of women does not display these gender differences at any age. These are women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that gives them a more typically-male hormone balance

Scott then applies the theory of preferences (objects versus systems) to other professions, such as medicene, where roughly equal numbers of women and men exist, but they dominate different specialties (women in Obstetrics, Pediatrics, Physciatry, Family Medicene, and men in Surgery, Radiology, etc). Women make up ~40% of US math grads, but they mostly go on to teach math! He contends women have left CS since the 70s out of personal preference, as it was one of only a few socially acceptable jobs for women at the time. Instead, they now choose to be a doctor or lawyer, and this OK.

edit: I also forgot to mention that he asks if discrimination/socialization are the chief culprit, why do they only affect CS and not other high status/high paying jobs (like being a doctor) which previously exhibited the same gender ratio.
Improve Python testing with parameterisation
No, that's not at all what I wrote.
Ask HN: Do you use SSIS (sql server integration server)?
If you use ssis would you be interested in a new application to review packages?

One click get to any property (including script tasks) with no more dialog boxes etc.

Would you possibly take a quick look at this survey, only 5 questions!

It would really help me out!

https://ed277.typeform.com/to/Rs8Gzd
People dealing with masses of data should find it hard to make it accessible, security isn't easy, you should have to learn what you're doing.

But also there should be no way to get it working insecurely. Should just refuse to run until everything is secure, data limits, timeout limits, retry limits, ip limits, account limits, password complexity, etc.
In general after WWII women had to take traditional men's roles since entire male generation was gone and from then on it became the new normal. STEM is not physically hard so it can be considered a more suitable field for women, also STEM paid less in USSR.

http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/molly-wolansk...
You know you are being completely hypocritical, right ?

You abhor discrimination during hiring. But yet you want to be able to discuss the differences between men and women in order to use them to discriminate.
Not sure why you are being downvoted for one of the few on topic posts in this thread.
> Making arguments by selectively withholding counter-evidence you are aware of to see if those arguments "withstand scrutiny" is not scientific process.

Indeed, but I didn't read Damore's memo as being intellectually dishonest in this way. He presented (with citations) some views that are held by most psychology researchers. And then he drew a few of his own (possibly flagrant) conclusions and speculations.

This sparked debate, and it is getting us talking. Damore wrote some great points (especially on free speech and intellectual diversity) and some terrible ones. This is the kind of free exchange of ideas that a successful and vibrant tech company should encourage.
Can you expand on this? Is it because of the opportunity cost of working during that time, or because you have to work so hard that the small positive amount of money you come away with is not worth your labor?
How Humans Turned a Sea Snake to the Dark Side
> "Better-performing men are being overlooked in favor of worse-performing women/minorities."

That sentence is backed if there is a correlation between genetics and skills.

> this has absolutely no correlation with performance

if gender does not have correlation with performance, why do we split sports into male and female? Why physical strength, endurance is related with biology and the mind is not? when the brain is the most important organ in our bodies and in charge of controlling all the hormones which gives us more or less strength. In what facts do you support that claim?
I don't understand why you are downvoted : that's absolutely true, Rust isn't quite the best choice for web backend ATM, by far.

It's way better than last summer though, rocket and the recently announced gotham framework look great, and I'm really excited to see how it evolves in the next few months.
In the US, protests can only be regulated as to time, place, and manner, not content.

In the PRC, I can only imagine content is the most heavily regulated aspect.
So firstly - let me say that this has been one of the most level-headed responses to the memo that I have seen so far. I personally found it very constructive. Bravo to the author and the interviewees.

I did want to discuss one particular line of thought from the interview though:

I can see that there are wide swaths of people who would refuse to work with him

Two of the interviewees gave this justification for why he should have been fired, and I have seen it elsewhere as well. I disagree, though. I have worked with with people in the past with whom I have ideological differences. But it has never stopped me from at least trying to get along and work productively with that person.

We just don't know from the evidence presented thus far what James Damore is like to worth with. Maybe he's a sexist asshole who is incapable of treating women fairly (in which case he does deserve to be fired). Or maybe we can take him at face value when he says he appreciates diversity and prefers to judge people as individuals rather than as a group. We just don't know.

On the other hand, if there are employees at Google who despite having never met James Damore before are telling their managers "I can't work with him based on this thing he wrote or this idea he believes", aren't they also in the wrong here?
Jupyter Notebook (was: IPython Notebook) notebooks are diff'able and executable. Spreadsheets can be hard to review.
https://github.com/jupyter/notebook

It's now installable with one conda command:
``conda install -y notebook pandas qgrid``
I read the full memo ( https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...) and it didn't seem like that at all. Saying that discrimination exists but differences in gender representation aren't necessarily caused by discrimination didn't seem like 'you're all wrong', not do the 'suggestions' seem like something someone writing authoritatively would make. Not a female engineer so appreciate I may be missing something - what is it?
What I understand from this situation is that he ran through a minefield and stepped on a few mines. Could someone else have run through that minefield and not stepped on any mines... probably. Is it reasonable to expect some one to be able to run through a minefield and not step on mines? No. Should we prevent people from running through the minefield...?
being closely followed by "nazi"
I do not live in the US. Those reimbursement is what sounds really weird.