skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having read and just reread the memo, I don't think a better starting point for this discussion could've come from somebody on his side if Google had specifically asked for it. Maybe a professional journalist or someone with too much time could've spent some time dancing around the issues to make it less offensive, but I don't think that would've been productive.

EDIT: Apologies for answering a question before it's been asked, but to clarify my point I don't think the quality of writing is that amazing (or relevant). I'm more speaking towards the general tone and content of the memo, which is far more polite and open than most editorials I read by professionals.
The skeptic tribe is extremely politicly polarized.
I disagree. Making arguments by selectively withholding counter-evidence you are aware of to see if those arguments "withstand scrutiny" is not scientific process.

Certainly, arguing about which evidence is more important, or how to resolve apparent conflicts between various data, is perfectly fine. But if you are making arguments that you know don't hold up to evidence, you are not arguing in good faith. For that to be a legit argument, you have to motivate why that evidence should be discounted.
Nobody can because he never claimed that. This is what strikes me the most about the whole diversity memo gate: even the most high profile responses, including this one, contain straw man arguments and not many people seems to care. The engineer Edith goes as far and completly and uterly disagreeing with something that is NOT IN THE MEMO.
She submitted it to ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. I would personally consider it a cryptography paper, for three reasons:

1. She purports to introduce a novel result that bridges "medium-grade" performance characteristics and security characteristics in one primitive. In fact, if you look at the PCG Random website (pcg-random.org), she very clearly compares and emphasizes both performance and security characteristics with functions like xorshift and ChaCha.

2. We see cryptography papers submitted to all manner of theoretical CS conferences and journals, for example Symposium on the Theory of Computing, which are not uniformly crypto-focused.

3. She acknowledges herself that she found it hard to categorize her paper (it could be relevant for simulstion, it could be relevant for stream ciphers, etc) in a blog post about how she chose the venue: http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/history-of-the-pcg-paper.htm...

As a meta point I read the whole thing, and I actually think it would be a nice publishable result if it were, say 10 - 20 pages. But 60 is wild! It took me longer to get through this "accessible" paper than it did for me to get through any of Boneh's papers on constrained and puncturable pseudorandom functions!

It's definitely interesting, and sure, why not explore "medium-grade security" that makes explicit tradeoffs with performance and security. But the presentation seems like it was written by someone writing for a non-academic audience, and the content of 6.2.2 "Security Considerations" is really light on provable security.
He was like it or not thrust into it though by the choices google has made, or appeared to make. When your hiring demographics do not roughly match graduation demographics you are not being honest. There is every appearance that google is discriminating against males in their efforts to search out women. This might be best for google overall, but he is a male which means it is not in his personal favor.
I think part of the "tough problem" is that some people don't feel that being unprofessional in this particular manner isn't at least slightly morally wrong. She asked for advice, he's free to negotiate ROI, promotion, and validation, but in a conversation about business, "are you single" is already crossing a line, nevermind "do men turn you on?". There's a time and a place for that!
He came from outside the valley, started from zero, and earned his way to this so called "network" by building things that got people excited.
> I also doubt that internal employee message boards or collective Word documents are the correct forum for this sort of debate.

What is the right forum?
Peer review is basically just proof-reading, and taking 60 pages to present 10 pages of findings is exactly the kind of thing a proof-reader should catch.
That doesn't really mean anything though in the context of things.
Your cited study is certainly not the only one that exists on the topic. See http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger....
Somewhat. I am hypthesizing more than ethnicity being used.
Would you be willing to answer some questions via email?
The sun is also very intense when it shines and it dries out clothes very quick. We have problems because the sun dries out the soil too much for plants so we have to put them in shadier areas. I live in an area with 300+cm of annual rainfall.
Of course we should all have equal opportunity to express our feelings, just as we should have equal opportunities to become software engineers.

That said, I don't think it's true in general that men have a hard time stating (like this, pseudomously, in an interview) that they are hurt/offended.

And a brief look at comment-threads should illustrate that it's hardly easy for women to state such things in public. The power mild statements by women can have to bring out raging trolls with death and rape threats would be absurd if it wasn't such a sad indicator of how far we still have to go toward a free/equal society.

All that said, part of the structural repression of women tend to be repression of certain traits in men as well - limiting gender roles in society is in general not good for anyone.

I think Dar Williams puts it well in her song "When I was a boy":

http://www.metrolyrics.com/when-i-was-a-boy-lyrics-dar-willi...
> It's on my website, which is a blatant copyright violation

Tangential, but I long for a world where we can all be as candid with each other.
>People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave.

That was probably true in the past, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore:

"The UN has said that seven in 10 people crossing the Mediterranean from Libya are economic migrants and the rest are 'people in need of protection' like refugees and asylum-seekers."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4661866/amp/UN-says-...

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12FDB/production...
As far as I understood, the "fake" part of these fake eclipse glasses is calling them eclipse glasses with the implication that they are safe when they are not or not made to the proper standards, not that they were forging real manufacturer information.
Online courses are worth nothing.

Employers will ignore you the second they find out your master is not legit.
> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills.

This to me is the most interesting question that hasn't been answered about the memo. There seems to still be two camps, those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. They can't both be right and I'd imagine if we could take a look at Google's hiring practices it wouldn't be too hard to tell which is which. Of course, we can't Google keeps its hiring practices, at least the ones relating to diversity very hush hush. This was actually Damore's impetus for writing the memo, he attended a diversity summit at Google where he learned about his employer's hiring practices and also observed that this summit was, unlike other meetings at Google, not recorded for later viewing. Damore's conclusion was that the hiring processes were unethical and likely illegal, although afaik he's yet to say specifically what it was that he observed. Still I don't think it's very reasonable to say that Damore has caused harm with this misrepresentation unless you can show conclusively that it is indeed a misrepresentation, and so far I haven't seen anything conclusive that shows that.
Alleviating suffering over the long term, which includes fixing institutions when it's appropriate.
>> Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good.

there's different types of 'good' and 'bad'.
for example, the whole IQ thing came into the light in the UK when poor Jewish kids from the ghetto (bad) were clearly outperforming their non-Jewish counterparts from more affluent (good) neighborhoods.
I'm surprised they don't run into CDN issues.

Have run into more than one issue with the vary: Accept being ignored, resulting in everyone getting the result from the first man in regardless of header variance.

Especially noticeable when we tried supporting both JSON and XML via the accepts header, with the version in the mime.
One of the women in the article addresses that very aptly:

> Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?

Creating a stereotype generates distrust in the individuals that are part of the group described by the stereotype. You yourself had to delve on the wording of the phrase to explain why you think it's different. Do you think the average person would put as much thought on the wording?
All i got from the memo, besides the echo chamber part, which google, and others managed to prove almost immediately, was that the author thinks there are biological differences between men and women, which lead to women being less interested in the field, thus being under-represented, and that google's sexist practices won't change that, only make people resent the diversity hires.

Was i reading the wrong memo? Because everybody, including the 3 interviewees, no matter if they seem calm and collected, keep attributing malice, and talking about how the author said women are less suited to being good engineers, and that women shouldn't be encouraged to get interested in STEM. Where was that stated?
Interesting thoughts - I think the biggest misunderstanding thus far involves generalizations. You can accurately make generalizations about a group of people, without implying that a given individual necessarily falls under that generalization. For example you could say "80 percent of males are into action movies" - but you should not go up to an individual male and state "you are into action movies" if you care about factual accuracy. Whether or not Damore's generalizations are accurate is up for debate, but lets say for the sake of argument that they are. I do not think its harmful to say "10 percent of women are really into engineering currently" no more than it is harmful to say "50 percent of women are really into engineering currently." In fact, only a subset of the male population is into engineering, so it is preferential even within a sex. If anything, I think it makes it worth celebrating the women who ARE into engineering even more. So (hypothetically) you could say fewer women are interested in engineering, but it does not mean those who are into engineering are somehow less qualified than males.
You buy goods with bitcoin by converting it to usd. Nothing is priced (at least for extended lengths of time) in bitcoin, because of the price voltaility, because of the pyramid scheme.

And yes, your perception of the value of something does influence whether or not it is a pyramid scheme. If you buy 10,000 scented soaps because you want a ton of scented soap that isn't a pyramid scheme. If you buy 10,000 scented soaps thinking you can find 1,000 people to buy them off you at more than you paid for them, then you are dealing with a pyramid scheme.

Fundamentally, the price growth most bitcoin users (you would be in the minority) want depends on a definitional pyramid scheme of attracting new money to drive up the price of bitcoin. It isn't even debatable - the coin minting model of btc that declines over time directly maps to how to run a pyramid scheme on it, where early adopters get the most return.

Most IPOs are pyramid schemes. The stock traded price of gold is a pyramid scheme. Any system where you participate on the assumption of scarcity going up, and thus your piece becoming more valuable on the backs of new entrants to the market is a pyramid scheme.
I'm from the midwest and most people who weren't aiming for Ivy Leagues just took the ACT.
Good Omens: David Tennant and Michael Sheen to Save the World in TV Adaptation
Show HN: One hostname to rule them all
remember I was speaking in Damore's hypothetical voice. The program is typically called "unconscious bias awareness training" as well as "diversity training". But yes, he was sent to a training program that irritated him.

Please don't criticize my portrayal of someone else's impressions of those programs as if that was my own opinion. You are free to watch Damore himself speak about that in the several taped interviews he has given since being fired.
I'm in an AWS dev ops training class as I write this. We're still experiencing a lot of timeouts related to IAM.
> There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe.

I feel unsafe as a Man when people advocate that employers should engage in gender discrimination against Men to enforce an arbitrary ratio of Men/Women the workforce.

Do I have the right to feel safe? Do Men have the right to get Women fired because they feel unsafe and threatened by the ideas they express?

There is a double standard and institutional bias that is being perpetrated by corporations like Google. I see no attempt to address these issues in away that changes there institutional bias and affords equity to the opponents to these ideas. This is simply damage control.
Thanks for the link, but I disagree with your interpretation and the analogy here. I interpreted this link as saying "don't speak in absolutes", not "don't hurt someones feeling". More often than not, there's information you find out later, and its very likely that you could be wrong. EG: nobody can run a 4 minute mile.

This memo did not say women were bad engineers.
If you use “ascribed gender” and “gender identity” to describe the (external and internal, respectively) social traits, you avoid the confusion between the two and with the biological trait that comes with using bare “gender” for that purpose.
Yeah he's great! My favorite on the more practical side of things is ChrisFix: https://www.youtube.com/user/PaintballOO7
ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software.
> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem).

This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.
IMHO, you should discuss it with your employer.

Declaration of prior inventions in my experience is typically used to exclude work you've already done from being covered in your invention assignment form, by which your employer generally owns anything you invent while being employed.

If your side-projects are in the same domain as your job, and you're signing any kind of IP assignment form, you should probably clear that with your employer, and accept that you'll either (1) get a waiver from them, (2) stop working on your side projects, (3) be in a world of IP pain when your side project and employer's project come into conflict, or (4) get a different job.

Github has a model agreement that protects your side-projects, if your employer agrees:
https://github.com/blog/2337-work-life-balance-in-employee-i...

Of course, IANAL.
There are degrees of "are", right, implicit in such a statement.
Cannabinoid GM yeast has already been created

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/newly-risen-fr...
Libraries are and have always been more than just about the books, and the information therein. They're also meeting places, community centers, and sometimes even double as soup kitchens. They are public forums. They are polling locations.

They're still, to this day, very important, and the fact that they're dying is a bad thing.

And to address your second paragraph, libraries have been, some more slowly than others, adapting with the times. My local library system has _three times_ the number of ebooks as they do print books. They provide access to things like EBSCOHost. Heck, the librarians in this system are even trained to help you find jobs.

In fact, all of this was addressed in the article.
> ...is not scientific process.

Of course it isn't. When establishing narratives and complex causalities, you don't use scientific (inductive) reasoning, you use abductive reasoning. You use inductive and deductive reasoning to fill in points, but you have to use abductive reasoning to reach a broader conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning
Most submissions about this topic have been flagged or moved off the front page. That this article hasn't been flagged and remains on the front page is because of it's provenance.

Now, the discussions do tend to be good on the whole - but many users here are fed up with the topic and want to get back to hacking. I'm glad to see more reasoned discussions happening, and hope that people could look back at themselves when this thing first occured and see how they reacted then.
i remember when former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa advocated a goal of planting another 1 million trees. never reached it. too much water was required.

with global warning and frequent droughts, the thinking is now that LA is a "post oasis" landscape.
She messaged him on Facebook after finding him through a Facebook group dedicated to entrepreneurship. If we grant that facebook is a more casual environment, for the sake of argument, his line of questioning should have ended at "are you single"! I don't see how her intent could have been more clear.
Universal claims have to be made to be invalidated, I would think.
Using Python's namedtuple for mock objects in tests
As I said, up to 1.7% according to at least one (albeit rather criticised) study - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11534012

The criticisms are more about terminology than the core argument though - they mostly argue that "intersex" should only cover a small number of conditions that result in an arbitrarily substantial differentiation from a "normal" male or female, rather than any significant differentiation. So if the question is about sexual dimorphism, those criticisms are mostly irrelevant.

But here's a question: why is it important that they can reproduce? Gay men and women are unlikely to reproduce either, so should we ignore them in policy-making too? Are gay people abnormal?
"I personally wouldn't bring up any studies/factual-statistics regarding it in polite conversation with a member of the relevant race being present. [links to studies]"

Which is to say you either A: don't consider hn polite conversation or B: don't imagine the "relevant race" is present.
Which is another way of saying, once again, that he was extremely naive to believe the freedom of speech exists in the workplace.
No. The memo says:

"The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause."

So it's not that "leftists are violent", it's PC that's complacent to violent PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming. A bit different.

Again, I have the impression that parts of this debate could be avoided by accepting some of the caveats and distinctions already made in the memo.

Edit: replaced angry outburst with more civilized one.
> If you buy 10,000 scented soaps thinking you can find 1,000 people to buy them off you at more than you paid for them, then you are dealing with a pyramid scheme.

I'd argue that is run-of-the-mill wholesale / retail sales.

Expecting to make a profit doesn't cause a thing to be a pyramid scheme.
People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave.

As respectfully as possible, this is completely wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=migrant+crisis+economic

I phrased this a little wrong, the source of the current refugee crisis is mostly not Africa, but my point is that the societal disruption you're referring to is not caused by voluntary immigration.

Not even the majority of unauthorized border crossers into Europe are from Syria. Once again with all due respect, these are very definitely voluntary actions on the part of the border crossers.

Check out this article from 2 years ago, even then it wasn't primarily Syrians.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/closing...

The migrants come from a vast swath of Africa and the Middle East, spanning not only war-torn Syria (in the first four months of 2015, Syrians accounted for just 30 percent of those crossing the sea) but also Nigeria and the Gambia and Eritrea and Somalia and Mali.

The migrants who embark upon this journey are typically represented as terrorized and impoverished—as people driven (to quote Amnesty International) “to risk their lives in treacherous sea crossings in a desperate attempt to reach safety in Europe.” The demographic and economic facts complicate that story. When populations flee war or famine, they generally flee together: the elderly and the infants, women as well as men. The current migrants, however, are overwhelmingly working-age males. All of them have paid a substantial price to make the trip: it can cost upwards of $2,000 to board a smuggler’s boat, to say nothing of hundreds or even thousands of dollars to travel from home to the embarkation point in the first place. Very few of the migrants from Libya are actually Libyan nationals.
Word on the street is that half of the Church of England's priests are closet-agnostics. Or at least it's close enough to true that this is a common quip.

If you want something that's certified to be Christian-free, you might want to look up the humanist branches of the Freemasons. Or some of the humanist Quakers.

Or just pick any random hobby like swing dancing for a community around it.
| Then more recently some academics have re-defined gender again to mean "ones own innate conception of one's male/female identity."

Nope. What you are talking about is Gender Identity. There is pretty good evidence for this being real and linked to prenatal testosterone exposure at certain periods in the womb, as with traits like digit ratio. Between cases like David Reimer's (a biological boy who was raised as a girl after a surgical accident as an infant, but whose gender identity stayed true to his birth sex - with tragic consequences) and the phenomenon of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (where genetically male XY are born with female-looking genitalia and raised as any other girl, but overwhelmingly continue to identify as women even after the condition is discovered in puberty), the existence of a gender identity that is separate from both chromosomal sex and social influence is not really in doubt.
he's a right wing libertarian and has been involved in some controversies. when someone says right wing extremist I think of the neo-Nazi's in Charlottesville, not some blogger with anti-authoritarian views.