skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Precisely, there just grasping at straw men arguments to deflect from the fact that they refuse to consider Scientifically based criticism of there polices when Science disagrees with there ideology.
This is addressed in TFA.

> [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work. (Ida)

> I’m just exhausted by having this same damn argument over and over again since I was a teenager and the amount of time and energy I keep having to spend to counter it. (Edith)

Also, none of the "quoted phrases" that you criticized appear in TFA or in any parent comment.
Error handling involves quite a bit of manual work, memory management if you're allocating nodes during the parser and also trying to do error recovery is even worse. Best dealt with by a slab or pool allocator. It's not very OO-frinedly and you can only have one instance running at once. That was my experience of trying to manage several parsers for Verilog, VHDL, DEF and similar ecad formats.
this highlights the insanity of the response to this memo.

What Edith "completely and utterly disagrees with" is actually not in the memo. And she actually agrees with what is in the memo "Interest in certain jobs."
I think this is a myth. I went from making $55,000 per year as a software engineer in Virgina to making over $100,000 per year in the Bay Area (I'm not anonymous on here so keeping exact amount secret). My rent went from $1500 per month to $2100 per month. My salary increase has more than covered the increased cost of rent.
* stores data - yes

* handles crashes - yes

* detects corruption - no

I'd want all three for a general purpose FS.

Snapshotting is nice but it's complex and expensive, and you can do fine without it. But telling you if your data is safe should be an expected feature for a general purpose FS.
I wish every company would be this open on their strategies. Between this and netflix, its great to see the cutting edge in action
> Why has this topic exploded like it did now especially in the software engineering context?

Theories:

- Especially acute gender gap

- Tech getting attention for its gender gap affecting corporate policies

- Culture of valuing merit of people and ideas. Coders generally think the best idea should win, regardless of where it comes from.

- Software engineering is probably more collaborative (on many scales) than research science. Teamwork is a day to day reality and culture issues are more important.

- Top talent in research science isn't as concentrated as it is in the case of software talent. Big companies literally buy small companies for the market share of talent. Culture issues in the big software companies will get much more attention.

- Software engineers are online more. The memo was originally a Google+ post, I gather. It's probably easier for electronic discussions to leak onto the internet.
Unless he was advocating something truly reviled in society, like murder or cannibalism, it's not difficult to find ways to be sympathetic towards him and his words. This does not mean it isn't derogatory against a group, even if that group doesn't all agree.
sure, you can find a niche (even if rather large) where this would be true and PC ideas are more popular. goes the other way around too though as there are plenty of places where today's PC ideas are frowned upon.

the kicker is - the PC crowd is so used to their opponents being quiet (primarily due to extreme intolerance of the "left" towards dissenting opinions - as illustrated by this whole memo ordeal) - that they actually start believing that their views are shared by just about everyone around.
It really doesn't matter if the memo had any truth to it or not. At the end of the day, that really is immaterial to the result. What happened because of the memo is it managed to piss off virtually every woman in the company. You don't piss off 20,000 of your coworkers in a completely avoidable manner and keep your job.
> Amazon does have all kinds of escalation features and different levels of seller support to deal with a suspension.

Hah, my amazon seller account got automatically suspended due to at $0.12 balance that Amazon had added retroactively and never notified me about. I paid it and figured it would be automatically un-suspended, but nope...

I reached out through every support channel I could find. All of my seller account tickets were automatically closed as "resolved" without any human response. Twitter gave me the run-around. Someone on the forum said they'd look into it, but nothing changed.

But you know worked? Canceling all of my AWS services and explaining that it was due to shoddy treatment from other parts Amazon. My seller account was un-frozen a few days later. I let the last item of mine they had sell and haven't looked back since.
I've a quite similar background. Brazil, mid 30s, major in Business (FGV), transitioned into dev in 2015, though I had earlier experience. Two failed companies as well :)

I agree becoming a decent full stack developer is better than doing an MS were the focus is fundamentals. However, those matter. Things like concurrency, data modeling, relational algebra, strong OOP fundamentals are used daily in any non-trivial backend work. OTOH, engineering stuff like auth, version control, testing, data cleaning and migration seems not part of the course and are quite relevant.

My personal recommendation is to learn multiple languages. You'll learn the concepts and abstract away the implementation. C++, Java, Python and R are different enough and very useful when looking for jobs.

I also recommend doing puzzles to learn algorithms and data structures. Not because you'll see a lot of them in your day to day, but a lot of places use them to weed out job applicants.

Which brings us to the most important advice of all: focus on remote work for US customers. Really. You can easily make $30/h, that translates to around 16k BRL as a "PJ". After a few years, $50/h, $70/h and even more is not unusual. That's upper mgmt level money down here with a fraction of the burden.

You can ping me at cjalmeida at gmail.com if you want to talk more.
> Gorillas typically have black fur. So no gorilla can have white fur? Wat?

More like "white people are generally bigoted, but of course this doesn't apply at an individual level".
This is literally what almost all persuasive writing is about. I cannot recall the last time I saw someone write or heard someone speak the words "let's have a discussion" to people who didn't already agree without really meaning "you people need to shut up and listen". I actually find it refreshing when people say that instead. But seriously who is writing to this standard we seem to have suddenly adopted for this one thing?
In many cases amazon is clearly liable. Amazon is the one who mixed unsafe and safe glasses. When someone ordered from a safe seller amazon didn't always ship the glasses that seller provided, they shipped something which might be safe or might be dangerous.

If this goes to court this guy is safe because his supplier will show up with their lawyers (and deeper pockets) and point out that their glasses are safe. They will show that Amazon was the party who didn't take care.

Note, there are many different ways to sell on amazon. I'm not clear which route this guy took, only some result in nobody knowing if the glasses amazon ships are safe.
It's not about class.

People who go to $1 showings of movies often don't really have their attention invested in the movie. The movie theater just becomes a cheap place to hang out with friends, and they start chatting with each other during the movie, ruining it for the people that are there for the actual movie.

Higher prices keep out the riff-raff. Riff-raff of course being assholes, who as you say, live in every tax bracket.
I broke into professional web dev with 0 experience with a combination of codecademy/codeschool, a good attitude, and very importantly be willing to work for minimum wage or near it at the beginning. (Actually I offered to work my first job for free but they denied for legal reasons and gave me something like $10 / hour)

I got a raise in my first job after about 2 months but what got me in the door was having zero salary requirements. From there I have averaged about a 40% salary increase per year for the last 5 years meaning I'm now over 6 figures so it didn't hurt my long term prospects at all.

There are really only a couple primary factors that employers judge you on and salary is the only one you are able to easily change so I think it's an obvious option in terms of trying to break into a new industry.
Not the OP, but more and more it seems that if you are not 100% unequivocally clear, someone will attack you as if you agreed with a polemical point.

I think this is in part due to the "chilling effect". I've been there myself. I have to be super clear that I don't endorse nor necessarily agree with some point lest I find myself being equated with the worst of the worst...regardless if I agree or not with said point.

It's very sad actually.
"Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems."

This is conciliatory to you? Implying that the opposing side is blind to the truth and such blindness is preventing them from actually solving problems? Because to me this comes across as hostile and condescending.
Damore is planning to sue under the National Labor Relations Act or California's tough law against restricting political activity. The legal experts seem to think he might have a weak to a decent case. I would think Google would try to settle anyway, in order to prevent discovery and the release of their internal communications about the memo and their internal data about the performance of different groups on job interviews.

Is there anything that would prevent another Google (or Facebook, etc.) employee (with a lower salary or thinking Google is not for him anyway) from going completely by the letter of the law and suing when fired? That employee could make a more limited case that Google's diversity programs discriminate against white or Asian men in hiring, complain about diversity training sessions, say something about agreeing with Trump's policies and with the conservatives (to make it more explicitly about political activity), write about organizing other employees who agree, make sure to file an NLRB complaint before getting fired, bring up some IQ meta-analysis studies to make sure it's scientific, yet controversial enough to get him fired, state that he's happy to work with Googlers of all sexes and races and that he holds their skills in high esteem and hopes everybody else does too (to make a firing based on the employee manual less credible), use email (because that's what's specifically in the law), run it all through a lawyer first, and don't do any post-firing interviews as Damore has done.

Wouldn't that cause huge headaches for Google and other tech companies? If such emails get leaked, the bad PR would force Google's hand to fire him, as happened with Damore. It seems like companies that want to see themselves portrayed as socially progressive might end up between a rock and a hard place.
But Google was and is a debate club - there is extensive information about Google's multiple discussion boards and lively cluture of dialectics. Why do you object/punish a single discussion that you happen to disagree with?
On a side note, I once met and chatted a bit with Dr. Terence Parr (creator of ANTLR) at a talk he gave in Mumbai.

He had come there both to talk about ANTLR and to recruit students for his course at the University of San Francisco (IIRC).

Here's a photo I took of him with a possible future student:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/vram/31351410/

Nice chap.
So, if bring your car back, sixty days after taking it, it wasn't taken away?

They took their property. They are deprived of its use. It really can't be more clear. That they may get it back later doesn't mean it wasn't taken.
So basically its ok to discrimate against Men because Women are 'opressed'. Thats not an acceptable argument imo.
The public link can be just as unpredictable.
> The document still did harm.

Do you think she was unaware of Googles strong push for women in the workplace?

That seems unlikely.

Do you think she was previously unaware that many people might think diversity hires are less qualified?

That seems unlikely.

Did the memo guy state that diversity hires are lowering the bar? No. He went out of his way to say the opposite.

The most likely scenario is she has felt this way since she was hired and now has a specific person she can direct her anger/frustration/hurt onto.

> and it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.

This is demonstrably false. Imposter syndrome is quite common for men in tech.

I would be interested to see studies on imposter syndrome between genders and between fields.
Well anything near Times Square is a mess, I'm in a quiet part of Brooklyn.
How many of them read the memo, as opposed to misleading characterizations of it ("Women can't do engineering", "misogynist", etc)?
This article is the first I've seen on this memo and by the spread of it inside and outside the company that's what it appeared to be. I'm not trying to mischaracterize the issue. In fact, I don't have all of the information.
Malaria will be eradicated by CRISPR if anything. It's almost a waste to try and fully eliminate it any other way.
PC and popular are not at all the same. A vocal minority gets to define PC, and that minority happens to be on the left.

If the right were as aggressive as the left were about PC, they'd say "Talking about baby-murder [abortion] makes me feel unsafe as a mother and therefore if it is mentioned at work creates a hostile work environment"
He could have brought up his concerns to hiring authorities in the company, whose job it is to refute diversity myths. Not expect people who have had this burden placed on them for their entire adult life to do it yet again.
You are absolutely correct and this was my oversight. That being said, the net social benefit is still great and the parent commenter's opinion that they are not important because of the internet is a flawed argument.
Still, you are correct.
New fields don't constitute the kind of backwards-incompatible changes mentioned in the blog post (adding fields is just as easy with RESTful APIs). GraphQL does help cut down on payload size (no extra fields for clients that don't need them), but if you're making major changes to the shape of your data, you'll still need to write some kind of compatibility layer.
I'd argue that it's objectively aggressive. His twitter handle "@fired4truth" makes the intention to be so rather obvious (the content he's promoting on that handle is an entire additional ball of wax)...

A 10-page manifesto, regardless of the content, when circulated internally without management's consent is in itself hard to view as anything but an act of mutiny.
> So, if bring your car back, sixty days after taking it, it wasn't taken away?

If you give me your car as part of a contracted arrangement where, in certain circumstances, you will temporarily lose your access to it, then I haven't taken it from you, even if those circumstances materialize (as a result of your action or otherwise.)

I may have denied you access to it, but that happens all the time, with all kinds of property, in contracted relationships, without prior involvement of an outside arbiter.
You're begging the question. Also, don't put something in quotes that was not a quote.
Congratulations and best wishes!

I for one really liked the demo and the blog - specifically, (a) I have great exemplars for what you mean by "theme", and (b) this post[1] shows great insights into your thinking about the problem faced by your customers

> Developed on canonical text like news article or Wikipedia, they either failed to understand the variety of expressions, or were too hard to explain.

It appears to me that the current methods and resulting tools are heavily dependent on the problem formulation (or domain in general). Moreover, no matter how fancy your technique is (or "how deep is your net"), the resulting model won't work unless you take specific steps to train it on data from the domain.

Yes, what I just said sounds borderline truism. However, I am more interested in discussing why it is so? Here's my initial thinking:

Let us look at (one of) the definition of Machine Learning, from Prof Tom Mitchell's textbook,
"A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E."

Here, experience E can be loosely considered as the amount of data you have for training - obviously, more data (i.e. training) should improve learning. However, the abstraction of T and P hides an important underlying problem of specification - or in other words, formulation of T (and E).

Thoughts?

> I wrote a new approach [capitalizing] on my PhD and new Deep Learning approaches.

I hope we get to see some of your insights in a paper or article (or blog post :)

[1] https://www.getthematic.com/post/visualizing-customer-feedba...
What environment? The social side of IT? I guess I'd say my perspective is based upon all the reading on many subjects, not just technical ones, I've done in the past 45 years. I'm not an expert in anything but I can follow a line of reasoning and get an idea where it is going off the rails. And 45 years of life and thinking too much is also a factor.

An essential point made in some answer by a real scientist on Quora on how wrong Damore was in so many things was Damore's reliance on "biology" being at the heart of his argument/worldview/etc. It was the way Damore phrased some sentence that made me realize it shouldn't be a surprise he is now 'out' as an alt-righter.

I have realized this obsession with biology is the mark of a large portion of conservatives who seem incapable of grasping the complexities of modern day society. Actual science that muddies this view w/ facts gets ignored... The reasons for this are complex and tie back to how conservatives' brains are different in some respects to liberals and how that affects psychological operations.
Biology is certainly important, but to boil down higher level things like society and psychological stuff to only that and then base your philosophy / world view on such reduces humans to little more than talking animals, which is at the heart of conservative thought. By "animal", I mean to imply all the connotations of that word. 'Biology' is a the primary filter they view the world through, and other filters lie on top of that. Instead of a multiplicity of filters, all at the same level, that when integrated, show a more holistic view of things.

So to cut this short, .... get a handle on dealing with complexity, I guess. Aspire to be a philosopher-king. Understand how your personal issues color your interpretation of things and affect your values (e.g. go to therapy or drop some acid). And take some acting classes to get a handle on a completely different way of interpreting the world.

And lastly, realize you are just a cog whose sole purpose is to provide surplus labor to the owners of a company. Embarrass the company and you will get fired. Google has strict clauses about not doing things that might result in public blowback (i.e. that don't write a book about a large software company clause in the employment contract). I can't imagine Damore didn't violate something like that and they should have fired him on that basis, not the more politically advantageous one of 'gender issues, diversity', etc. But Google is getting in legal hot water because of their pay imbalance from what I hear, so they used this whole thing to their advantage because now they seem like they aren't evil and do pay women (or try to) at equitable rates. See how an understanding of humans' hidden motives works? That's why you should take acting classes.
Managing multiple brands within your CRM
"Helping kids with the homework" I meant more in terms of using the machine as a study tool. Aside from edutainment titles, this didn't catch on until online encyclopedias and then the internet took root.

Using a computer to store recipes was wildly impractical. Using it to do basic CRM or point-of-sale tasks with a small relational or navigational database was much more appropriate.
It seems to be completely lost on a lot of HN people that Damore's memo was not very scientific at all for the subject matter he was tackling. It was written in a certain intellectual language that often provides a veneer of authority for those who agree with his conclusions and lack the domain knowledge to understand the nuances of why he's wrong. But a lot of these "bio-truth" type of arguments do the same thing.

Google had plenty of reason to rethink his employment, not just because of his poor judgement, but because of the fact that he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way.

All it would have taken was for him to run the essay past a couple of people with solid domain expertise, and they would have pointed out the dozens and dozens of problems with his assertions, reasoning and perspective.

As people have pointed out on HN before, there is something about computer science that leads people to believe they can out-think experts in other fields at their own game. And while reaching outside of your expertise is to be encouraged, it should come with a certain humility that is not common in our industry.
> She said "complicate" not "invalidate".

That's true. However, the trends are not complicated by the outliers. Her statement was meant to throw trending into question and I overstated by taking a bad position (phrase-wise).

> What actions do you wish to take based on the fur color of gorillas?

Provide more shaded areas (canopy or artificial), of course. I'm not sure who this elaborate "analogy" (populations vs individuals turned into a warped "industry is a zoo" metaphor?) is supposed to help.
It is often true that those that clean up the crap left by others are under appreciated :-)
This looks awesome!

How is the course delivered? Downloadable or streaming only? Can I watch it on Linux?
HN is definitely not what I would call polite conversation. Casually talking about the weather, asking how the wife and boys are is.

It is my understanding that this community makes a point about sharing "anything that a good hacker would find interesting".
It's a problem with phrasing, here. "Disagree with the specific methods he used", not "disagree with the fact that he used any methods at all". "Consider his particular use of science and data to be sketchy", rather than "consider that it was sketchy for him to use science and data".