skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The workplace shouldn't be the venue, except many companies are kind of forcing this issue into the workplace by making valiant and public-relations-tinged efforts at diversity. I think Google even has a Vice President for Diversity -- which to me seems a bit silly because unless there's a business case to be made, it's just feel-good self-congratulation for how "progressive" you are. Perhaps having a diversity manager -- but an actual Vice President level executive? That seems like that should already be in the portfolio of whomever is in charge of Human Resources -- certainly not a separate executive role.

Is a Diversity executive actually impacting the bottom line of the company? Are there any actual quantitative facts that indicate that "diversity" improves a business's profitability? I am not arguing against diversity, please don't misunderstand. But it feels to me that this violent desire for diversity is something rather unique to SV tech. For example, the lack of men in the mental health professions barely raises any mention aside from the quadrennial NY Times think piece. The lack of men kindergarten teachers also barely makes a dent in the national discussion. The lack of women in building trades (despite those jobs being extremely well paying compared to "white collar" mid-level marketing jobs often dominated by women.) There's also not a big emphasis on the lack of women working in aviation or firefighting, despite those also being very well paid positions.

But for tech, for some reason it's a "big deal."

Fighting discrimination is obviously important as a basic matter of human rights, but much of tech's diversity push isn't about fighting discrimination as much as it's about actively recreating the balance of men and women in the field based on an arbitrary desired ratio.

If men and women are different, then it follows that they will have different desired vocations to a similar degree that they are different. If we argue that men and women are exactly the same, then why aren't more men working in mental health or social work -- those fields are about 80% women. We can't use the discrimination argument because that would imply that women discriminate against men -- and that doesn't fit the narrative that the straight white male is the bane of society.
I saw so many people saying the first (on sites like Medium and Facebook). Not on HN, though.
Holy cow.

With a pedestrian in / on the edge of the crosswalk. And there was even another car that had been moving just a few seconds earlier stopped there too...
Yes, but they do it in the topic they are discussing. The manifest was focused in changing the diversity programs in the company and was presenting facts to consider that option. In no way it was focused in discussing the differences between gender as a lot of people is try to claim. And it makes quite clear the difference between average and individuals.
> Here's the thing: for men being decent requires effort

Wow. That's blatant sexist bigotry.

Can you imagine if someone said the same thing about women and what the reaction on HN would be?
That's a completely made-up scenario. Google themselves have said that the way they're trying to hire more women is by looking harder for qualified candidates, not by lowering the level that meets "qualified".
I don't consider Trump a fascist. Still, if I substitute "Trump" for "fascist" in your comment, your basic message still rings true. Scary.
It's possible to swallow something indigestible that then comes out in poop - sometimes this could cause bleeding. If you have anything inserted in your anus for any reason this could also cause bleeding.
Maybe they'll modify it.

Paxos is an enterprise private blockchain snake oil company, but nobody there even knows it. When asked how they solve problems X, Y and Z, it turns out they have a blog article about how they haven't invented the solution yet. Tall order. Maybe commissions on their itBit exchange will keep them solvent enough to keep trying.
> Affirmative Action does not require having quotas (and, in fact, they are in mlst contexts explicitly illegal, even in venues required to have Affirmative Action policies).

Fair enough -- quotas aren't the issue, but affirmative action is the issue.

> So, insofar as it “causes” the that result, it is largely by interaction with false information deliberately spread by its opponents.

That's a concrete conclusion based on unprovable/shaky reasoning.

And even if that were true and you could prove it, it wouldn't change the fact concerning affirmative action (in this case, lowering hiring standards for certain groups) causing bias for both coworkers and the employee. How do coworkers know an individual got there on their own merit? How does an individual who is on/above par, yet who happens to belong to an affirmative action group, shake the internal/external stigma that they got there based on the lowered bar? These things contribute to bias whether or not we like the overall idea behind affirmative action (which is to level the playing field). Nothing comes for free.
How many men take offense to hiring quotas but keep their mouths shut so they don't end up like Damore? You just set up an environment where how someone feels is more important than logic/reason/truth and that is never a good position to be in.
I didn't extrapolate. I got that idea from watching the video. After Charlottesville, are you unconcerned about Nazis in the US?

Also I notice you haven't commented on my point - is it just a coincidence that only women Googlers have supported Pichai? From my pov it's a bad look if no white male execs at Google support Pichai's decision to fire Damore.
This would be a reasonable take to me if the issue he took up could reasonably be described as significantly affecting his everyday work life; the key difference I see in your "double standard" is that the woman can't walk away from being a woman in a male dominated profession.
Obesity is merely one factor. I have read a number of articles on this and even written at least one (I get paid to ghost write health articles). My understanding is, no, they don't really know why.

Furthermore, how to not be obese is not really a solved problem. Suggesting that fat people are merely irresponsible is pretty lousy. Most fat people have tried to lose the weight. Some have tried incredibly hard and done rather crazy-sounding things, to no avail. We don't really understand that problem space either. Some people are able to lose the weight and keep it off. Others fail and fail and fail while trying like hell.
Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering.

He didn't. He just claimed that they are on average less interested in those areas. There is no mention at all of ability in the memo, only in the manipulated press pieces.
breaks :p
> No, if you think there are problems with cgo, the solution is to address those problems, not reinvent it. If you have performance concerns, file a bug or comment on an existing one.

Well, sometimes the solution is to reinvent it and provide another solution. Sometimes a project has a specific goal which might preclude them from using your idea, or the people involved just have a slightly different vision.

Sometimes, if you believe the existing project is wrong from the ground up, the solution is to reinvent it as something else. Sometimes it doesn't pan out, sometimes it does.
That's the beauty of open source.
The author, Megan McArdle, is a columnist at Bloomberg. See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/megan-mcardle
It's never too late to turn to the Dharma. I lost a child recently and the only hope I can find out of it has been to study what the Buddha taught.

> if we start thinking about impermanence now, while we still have time to find skillful means to deal with it, then later we will not be caught unaware. Even though in the short term the contemplation of death and impermanence might cause discomfort, in the long term it will actually save us from greater suffering. [1]

1. http://rinpoche.com/teachings/sevenpoints.htm
To an even further extent, being radically honest doesn't mean you have to comment on someone's watch without being prompted in the first place. Also some of the suggestions given were blatant attempts to make money off of seminars.

That being said I enjoyed the article and some of the concepts and I admired the author's willingness to try it out at the expense and risk of his own social circle.
An important that detail is that they released and acknowledged it was a derivation of Cage's piece. IIRC that was the basic for the lawsuit.
Bill Gates was not upper "middle class", his household was solidly in the 1%, he had computer programming access at his private school (this is 1968), and his mother's friendship with the president of IBM at the time was the reason he got contracted to write DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career
If for some reason you don't have some ATF and acetone lying around, Kroil is the next best thing.
"Physics for poets".
> Which alt-right media did he reach out to?

His very first interview was with Stefan Molyneaux, a self-described "fighter for men's rights" (yeah, I know.)

> what's to be gained from him lying about this?

I don't think he was outright lying, I think he was just uninformed and made a lot of assumptions and drew
conclusions (biased by his own political views) out of those assumptions. I do think his inflammatory approach to accusing Google and Googlers of "leftist bias" was a way to get attention.

About what's to be gained? Well... he's been interviewed by the New York Times and he'll probably get a book deal out of it, plus whatever money he might get if he manages to successfully sue Google.
Parents, teachers, and students are so focused on "education" as a pedigree and job pipeline that if they don't see an immediate connection between a topic and a paycheck they're like "Who cares?! Why are you wasting my kid's time on that?"

When the whole thing is an exercise in competitive pedigreeing, of course it's going to be gamed. If it were more about human development, we'd be focusing on the deltas instead, and they'd be harder to fudge.
Aw, I feel bad about pointing it out now. I don't even have neon colored hair, but perhaps I am a bit jealous of the people who do.
Thanks, but we didn't do anything different in this case and are as surprised as anyone that the post went to #1 and (better still!) the discussion remained as civil as it has. I don't want people to think that the ycombinator.com domain affects moderation on an article like this, since our first rule is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved [1].

I emailed Cadran to warn her that the post would probably meet the same fate as the others, but I was wrong—the community responded quite differently. That's fine by us as long as the discussion meets the site guidelines, which this one mostly has.

Edit: also, the community should know that it, not moderators, produced this effect. IMO that makes the thread more interesting.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Thanks! The private key concern is sensible. Our plan is to open source the code and make the hosted version auditable in real time to prove the code being run is 'honest'. Bit of work to do on this, still. I'll post an update when we get there.
Life is random, from birth to death. We probably should not live it with fear or hard expectations. I remember reading on Twitter about an entrepreneur that was killed instantly from an avalanche on Mt Everest. Who could predict?

Just do the best you can, try to be kind, and use sunscreen.
> He came from outside the valley

who didn't? It's not Hollywood, there are no legacy cases
Very similar in the US, actually, although maybe not with quite as large of a private system (although some would like to change this). Very similar problems. I've had friends who work in the US school system who complain about this same issue--that private schools are immune to many problems because they can just pass the buck onto someone else.

The linked piece is very nice, and illustrates the selection bias problem extremely well.

One additional comment I might have is about variance. That is, in the figure with red and blue plots, those means are hiding within-school variance. In data I've seen, what often happens is that the lower-status schools often have more variance in them. So in some ways the problem with selection bias is maybe even worse than what the author suggests, because people not only tend to attribute to schools what was pre-existing, but they also tend to stereotype. E.g., you went to a school on the left side of that figure, so you're lower in ability and/or learning than on the right, even though you might be at the upper end of the distribution of the whole figure. This pertains to vocation too: people tend to assume certain vocations are signals of lower cognitive ability than others, when the reality is that uncertainly only increases for some.

The other thing I might mention is some social benefits to attending selective schools. The author at times seems to imply that "talented people will end up doing well regardless of where they go" somewhat dismissively. I think this was probably unintentional, but I think that's not exactly true in the way that people care about, because the studies that are done are kind of coarse. That is, if you study outcomes, they tend to be things like general income, or terminal degree attained (undergrad, master's, doctoral), or whatever. In that sense, things are fine. But because of social connections, people might not get into the particular job they want, whereas another person is given a free pass, or might be at a state-level position rather than a federal-level position, or whatever. That is, there are real consequences to overlooking selection bias, that have real importance for people, but tend to get fuzzed over in studies because it's difficult to study.
You say he didn't say that Google had to lower the bar, then you quote where he says explicitly that? "Google does X. X lowers the bar."

>So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.

Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.
My libraries cost $180/year through property tax. Most of the books I want to read are checked out. Most of the movies I want to watch are checked out. It takes a lot of time just to find something. I come to library to hang out. We then pick up something to read/watch randomly. The system is not very efficient.
This is an extremely valuable insight, but I don't think it's the root cause of the screaming match we're currently observing.

Some have already decided that the REASON for gender imbalance in tech is rampant bias and male privilege, which they have publicly committed themselves to stamping out. Whether or not this is true, questioning the validity of that reason is considered an attack on their identity and value system.

Edit: I'm not sure it's clear from my comment, but to clarify, I am NOT SURE what the reason for the observed gender imbalance is. I'm not saying that it isn't bias/privilege/etc. I don't think the case has been proven one way or the other, but the personal attacks & utter misrepresentations I've seen used to try to shut down discussion is driving me pretty hard emotionally to one side at the moment.
"...the workplace isn't the venue for [discussing your company's potentially illegal hiring practices]."
When you say consumer protection, you mean the SEC?

How does crypto make the SEC go away? If you want to live in the US, sure you could have a computer in your closet on a VPN running an exchange, but all of that needs to be on the books when you need to write a check to your kids private school.

I think it's more likely there will continue to be a black market and a white market. The black market will be bigger, and easier to use undetected. But you still will need to launder that money if you want to pay for your daughters ski trip. And not everybody has an appetite for felonies. The market of people who would prefer not to commit a felony is quite large actually.

What am I missing? How do you picture a world without an SEC?

The only way I can imagine is is if other muncipalities without as much regulation can show cryptocontracts can provide insurance that is so good and cheap the regulatory bodies are proved unnecessary, then that puts competitive pressure on more regulated economies. But... Fraud is a Hegelian arms race for the hearts and minds of naive investors. I just don't see how crypto contracts solve that, not in the next 100 years anyway. Maybe when teenagers are doing ICOs to pay for their lattes.
"Consider the set P {p1, p2, ... pN} representing providers and the set c {c1, c2, ... cN} representing customers"

versus

"Consider the set P of providers and the set C of customers"

The former is about 2x the length of the latter. This is the verbosity I read into the original comment.
Damore did do exactly this. The memo was only ever released in the context of "I'm looking for feedback on this and open to being proven wrong.
The private school system in Australia saves the government money. Per student funding in the private system is lower than per student funding in the public system. This money is then available to spend more on government schools.

It also keeps the government system honest because people can and do leave schools that don't work such as many of those in poor areas in the outer suburbs of the big cities and regional areas. If there were no private system the only way to get into better schools would be to own very expensive houses.

Meanwhile, the selective schools show that the government can provide a good education for highly able students as well. In NSW ~18 of the top 20 high schools are government schools.

Personally I think most people are unwise to send their kids to expensive private schools and they would help their kids much more if they put the money toward investments. But they are free to waste, in my mind, their money to reduce the cost to the tax payer of education.
As it turns out, the only website found to have a sense of humour is Reddit. There are no other websites on the Internet on which humour is found in the wild /s
Do you agree that stereotypes affect peoples choices of careers?
An important part of this discussion is using general population statistics, to describe programmers at Google.

Programmers at Google are NOT general population.

Without seeing that specific data, it may be that female programmers at Google are better than the males. I don't know, and it varies by project and role.

Then when we are talking about specific people, all the population statistics are irrelevant anyway.
Agreed, nothing is inherently male or female about one toy vs. another. However, there is evidence that preferences that eventually lead to a career in engineering and/or computer science might at least partially be due to gender and not to social norms. There's an excellent essay in [1] that sums up some additional research and also refutes some of the "it's all sexism" arguments that have been made. I recommend reading it and also the two comments to get a bit more data on the topic.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
If someone stabbed you in the rectum, the bleeding is explained. You should still probably get it looked at.
How can scale-ups continue learning as fast as startups?
> I have injured myself all sorts of ways I didn't expect.

It's kinda like how (in the days of old, at least) when you built a PC, if you didn't cut yourself and spilled a bit of blood (usually on a sharp case edge) - you were doing it wrong.

Instead, you have that one tight bolt you're wrenchin' and pullin' on - then suddenly it breaks free and WHAM, your knuckles get busted on the crossmember (or something else unforgiving).

Which is why, if you have the ability (leverage) and room, it always better to push on the handle of the wrench with an open palm or loose grip - that way if the bolt breaks loose, the inevitable won't occur...
If you look at

https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informati...

you see that world class infographics require a "data artist", that is a lot of curation. You have to set the parameters of the chart quite carefully to produce a graphic which appears insightful. It is very easy to change those parameters a little and wind up in a bad place, where you might overload the tools with too much data, etc.

Data viz tools that are easy for a non "data artist" to use are an active area for CS research, new software products, etc.

Another problem is that data is less interesting than it seems to be at first. What action are you going to take on it? Data analysis delivers value when it informs actions.

The history of international development efforts is that aid agencies often have little understanding about conditions on the ground. For instance, they would send big tractors to Chile and truck them at great trouble and expense to get them into farming villages that could not use them, fuel them, fix them, etc.

Thus reducing a country down to a few numbers could cause the illusion that you know something when you really don't.

The numbers themselves are suspect. In a place like Rwanda, few people file tax returns, much of the economy is farmers selling corn to their neighbors, so national income numbers are often a wild-assed guess.

Also the life expectancy numbers are not based on a rigorous probability analysis, but rather a simple model that takes the death rates of 15 year old people in 2015 and 45 year old people in 2015 and treats that like a Markov chain where you are pretending that the 15 year old in 2015 is going to die at age 45 in 2045 at the same rate that that 45 year old people die in 2015, which is just not true -- particularly if you consider exceptional events such as war, famines, etc.

Thus those graphics are great for a talk, but they don't have the real depth of knowledge you'd need if you want to sell something to those people, plan a business, run an effective aid program, etc.
Exactly. I'm afraid my only takeaway here is I can never talk about this stuff if I don't want to end my career right there. They'll always win the argument because they can simply destroy everyone who disagrees with them.

Yep, I had to create a separate account for this comment for fear of retribution.
That's what I thought, too, but then I read this [1]:

> “The honest truth is nobody knows 100 percent why there is an increase,” said Dr. Mohamed E. Salem, an assistant professor at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University. He said that he is older than about 60 percent of his patients — and he is 42. “It’s hard to blame it on obesity alone. We suspect there is also something else going on.”

The weird thing is that the sharpest increase is among young whites, and it doesn't seem to be entirely correlated with obesity.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/live/colon-and-recta...

[2] http://www.webmd.com/news/20170808/colorectal-cancer-death-r...
I think a large number of people in tech simply have a straight-to-the-point style of talking. They don't follow through with the HR-like "we appreciate your thoughts and comments, but going forward, we must politely decline to touch base again" style because the expectation is just to say "you're wrong and here's why." What's inviting to some people is insincere to others. What's straight-faced discussion is rude and problematic to others. It's hard reaching a middle ground, because when you try finding a middle point for a group the size of the whole tech industry about such a divisive topic, at least one person will accuse you of trying to appease (insert enemy political group here) and see it as worse than just taking a side.