skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to illustrate why I think the points brought up by this post have at minimum some level of validity with a toy example, that takes sex out of the equation completely.

Lets say you took a population of candidates with some distribution of individual programming skills, and assigned them randomly into two categories, with a 90-10 split between A and B. E(skill of a candidate in A) = E(skill of a candidate in B)

Now you rank all the candidates in A and B respectively from best to worst, and you pick the top N candidates from A, and top N candidates from B. Taking that set, E(skill of picked candidates from A) > E(skill of picked candidates from B)

There is no prejudice here! A and B are randomly assigned, if you pick any one individual from A, they are exactly the same on average as an individual from B. But conditioning on the constraint that you need to pick the same number from A and B, where A and B have different population size, then you will get the result that A is on average better than B.

In a hypothetical world where sexism does not exist, given the current ratio of men to women in tech we would expect to see a skill disparity in the average if we enforced hiring equal numbers of both men and women.

Edited to add some further points:

1) Note that the above does not hold true if the individual programming skills are constant after some threshold, so the top N from A and top N from B all have the same level of skill. I don't think this is true in my personal experience, but I have seen people make this argument.

2) The above also does not hold true if the ranking mechanism (interviewing process) does not actually rank the programming skills of A and B successfully. I've also seen people make this argument, but note that as long as some correlation exists between [interview result] and [programming skill] then the above still holds true. It seems highly unlikely that there is zero correlation.

3) I don't necessarily agree with the author that this is a bad thing - I think in the long run to get equal numbers of women and men in candidate pools, having equal numbers of female and male programmers at places like Google can only help. While theoretically there may be an average skill difference, I'm not sure that you can really notice it on an individual level because of the sheer number of qualified candidates that apply to a place like google.
The article doesn't say that you can't stay in business using DV certs, so that seems irrelevant. The article says that "Secure" falsely communicates to the average user the sense that it is safe to proceed without caution, and indeed was specifically chosen for that reason.

That's hardly controversial, I would have thought. If it's true, it's true whether or not the person telling you it sells EV certs.

Unwary PayPal users are regularly phished even though PayPal have EV certs because the average user doesn't know that authentic PayPal websites should always say "PayPal, Inc. [US]" in the address bar, and aren't concerned when the address bar says Secure instead.

I think the problem really is that we want users to be "safe" on the Internet without them having to learn anything, and the Internet just isn't there yet, and quite possibly never will be.

It's like trying to design a gun you can't shoot yourself in the foot with, because people won't put up with being taught gun-safety.

I do think we could benefit from new Internet users being made, probably by their browsers, to take a short training course in the basic aspects of what encryption really guarantees on the web, how recognise malicious websites, and the like.
It's not (quite)

Despite being called "programming languages", they are not really languages for people to communicate, but for computers to understand instructions (although, humans do need to understand a programming language to be able to code).

Saying that coding is like speaking another language can be confusing, so I'd recommend that coding is more like instructing a computer to do something (by writing instructions).
As someone who's grown up with computers, I think the biggest difference I see between ”technical” and “non-technical” people is a willingness to try things out and not be put off by intimidating new things. If you are willing to explore you will eventually figure it out, but if you are afraid you'll never get anywhere.
i tried f# and it really feels like a second classe citizen ( at least on macos). Very few educational resources. You still need to spend a lot of time on c sharp to learn the frameworks, and then maybe move to f#.
You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.

I agree, but how do you estimate their aptitude in an unbiased way? That mostly rules out face-to-face conversations, which is what most companies use.

Aptitude tests? I feel like those have a bad reputation, at least in Bay Area tech companies. Are there good tests we should be using? How do you customize the test to fit your own company? To the extent that "cultural fit" is important for effective teams (and isn't simply a way of excluding women, black people, etc) how do you test for that?
And the reception to the use of those words indicates the likelihood that the forum can support insightful or deep discussion.
Its a good idea to solve a short term problem( I suppose )

Short Term: Many companies will go creating cryptocurrencies to compete on with Bitcoin , ethereum etc. Only few with the likes of ethereum will survive as they offer not only cryptocurrency but also a general platform for other initiatives/services on blockchain and creating alliances( refer: https://www.coindesk.com/legally-binding-smart-contracts-9-l...)

Companies creating cryptocurrency for a specific problem like document sharing / storage services will be used only by select few or to subscribe to these services

For the short-term the AI-power bot will have to focus on the validity and credibility of the idea

Long Term: Once companies learn that ICO cannot be started every now and then - The AI powered bot will have to re-focus on other info like "pricing of the cryptocurrency", "security", "educating users"

I personally recommend that the AI-powered bot should be planned to be developed for challenges other than the ICO's which will keep reducing in the coming years.
Welcome to the "new normal" in crypto-currency. There's so much money floating around it ends up everywhere.
Is this satire? Holy shit if not. Did you try fooling it?

Wonder what their TOS allows them to do with just that data.
This is a really nice list of the implications, but breaking public-key cryptography is at the top of the list: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1488...

I should say, theoretically breaking public-key. In reality the problem may remain too hard to brute force even if the P vs NP problem is solved.
Riot's UI could be way better (i work on it), but we're constantly iterating to try to nail the UX. We changed it a lot on Android last month though (https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-unveils-the-next-genera...) so might be worth trying if you haven't recently.
Other than sales of this app, why is it necessary for 5 year olds to be programming?
>Egypt could scuttle a ship or two if they wanted - at both ends, trapping the fleet inside.

See the Yellow Fleet, trapped in the Suez Canal for 8 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet
>the mentoring program could be for girls and young women //

How is that fair for boys/men if they're excluded from mentoring opportunities (eg in a company that hires them) simply because they're male.

This is "fine" if your objective is "hire more women". As someone who supports equality of opportunity I don't see how compounding more sexism will ever lead to less sexism.

In the UK, overall, young men get poorer school results, are less represented at university, receive lower wages than women (up to the ages when people choose to start families) ... how does this sort of sexist mentoring policy fit in here? Is it really enough to say "well if we look only at this industry segment"?

What's wrong with equality?
I believe what they are saying is that the entire field just assumes P != NP and so if the proof came to be P != NP, then most people would just have their inklings confirmed and that's about it. It wouldn't really cause a shift in research in any of the CS departments. However, if P = NP, you can bet on a renewed interest in finding polynomial time algorithms.
"You can now refer to .NET Core/.NET Standard libraries from .NET Framework projects and vice versa. No need to manually add interop NuGet packages – Visual Studio does this for you automatically."

Excellent. Hopefully developers moves over to .Net Core en masse now, and I won't have to wait long for all my third party projects to switch over.
You can't even see the actual SSL cert in chrome anymore. Some UI decisions just don't make any sense, to the point where I think UI engineers are just trolling us all.
I believe interviewing.io did something with voice-pitch-adjusting (to make girls sound like guys, or vice-versa) in phone interviews to try to study exactly this effect.

I think their results were confusing and uncertain, but the methodology seemed brilliant and I think should be the gold-standard for tech interviews. If we keep it phone it would remove other subliminal biases (attractiveness, physical disabilities) as an additional benefit.
Thanks for an extra 1000 words explaining the prisoner's dilemma.

Edit: that was sarcasm
I agree with the recommendation. Automate the Boring Stuff is a great premise and a decent execution. But I'm really concerned by the OP's comment about not knowing math. As in, how much math don't you know? You don't need to be able to solve ODEs or multiply matrices to write Python, or in general unless your field of endeavor calls for it. But I've found that people who have a hard time with basic algebra have a hard time with life. Basic algebra at least, but ideally trigonometry, transcendental functions, and conic sections. People who don't know math think, "when would I ever use that?" The answer is "way more often than you would expect." When you don't know what you're missing, you have to invent bad answers to solved problems, or do without.
Umm...where's the research on the efficacy of the change on how skilled the kid becomes at programming? All I see is they self-assessed that it was easier with pictures, and they were engaged longer. Great. But DID THEY LEARN TO CODE BETTER?

The algebra comparison is telling; "a study was done that showed that 92.9% of kids using the app achieved mastery of basic algebra after 1.5 hours of play" - where's the similar comparison?

And, how do we measure 'mastery'? Because the mathematical lexicon requires numbers, not pictures, and coding non-trivial things are done with languages that are text, not pictures, the way we test that is also important.

Note that fundamentally I agree with their conclusion that, pursuant to being marketable, they HAVE to use pictures, because people's impressions matter. But in terms of actual benefit, I'd want to know more details.
Nestle is a Swiss company with choco factories in the US. If not, we can go with InBev AB.

In addition, the arctic/ mountain fox brand is pretty new. It'd be like the north face shoppers not liking it since it moved prod abroad. Here we're talking about a national symbol as well as a sentimental item. Baseball gloves, Randoserus.
This is special pleading. Software developers like to believe they're workaholics, but a job as a biglaw associate or a medical resident will eat your life in ways we'd find difficult to imagine, and it's hard to believe that the kind of work a law associate does (kowtowing to partners to gather more scut-work to get done for faceless corporate clients) is more meaningful than the work a developer does. That, and the fact that our supposed 80 hour work weeks consist of huge amounts of fucking around, and unlike an associate or a resident, we can almost always spend at least 30 of those "hours" WFH, and unlike either of those alternatives, if we roll into the office at 10:30 we're probably in the early bird cohort.
Hi Kartik! Yeah, my un-interest in ELF is part of why I haven't really read that code.
Doesn't that kind of point to an alternate solution, that the entire interview by interrogation coding process is the problem (if the input pool is 98% men of course they are going to get 98% men out) and they should be doing the mentor approach/internship for all junior programmers instead of the rigid pass/fail requirement. One of the problems with their current approach is similar to the college hazing ritual, all the upperclassmen went through it, so they're going to make everyone else suffer through it as well.
> If you want to equate murder, rape and plundering from and often enslaving strangers with the concept of unauthorized copying, then that's your prerogative.

I certainly don't equate those things. But words have different meanings in different contexts.

One of my favourite games from way back when was Sid Meier's Pirates!, so I might be coloured by that. And yes, it was pirated.
Discovery and Scripps: A House Divided
An interesting point in the post is about the Google interview itself, and how she had to appeal in order to hire candidates who then turned out to each have a big impact. Google calls this the false negative problem but it seems to be a big problem. Google itself has already have shown that GPA and academic credentials do not correlate with job performance.
I'm fairly certain you're incorrect. With the GIL you don't have to lock shared memory because the assumption is that only one thread will be running at a time. For example shared data structures won't be changed while being being read/written to by multiple threads, because only one thread is actually running.
If I had to guess, it's all of them. By "them" I mean all the anti-virus packages that are targeted at consumers and small business. That seems to have been part of the business model starting over a decade ago. My guess is that the negative effects of anti-virus is what prompted Microsoft to first build free products and then eventually roll anti-virus into Windows.

I'd put it this way. My first inkling that something was wrong was when Norton Anti-Virus shifted to a subscription model and charged me full retail for a renewal back around 2006. What does disabling virus updates for ordinary users with the explicit intent of leaving them vulnerable says about a company's attitude in regard to long term trust?

I left Norton for Kaspersky and paid it protection money for a few years. It seemed refreshing at first. One day, a few years later, I learned how to look at my LAN traffic and saw how often I was sending data to its servers. It was more often than seemed reasonable. That's about the time Microsoft started providing its own free anti-virus and I started switching machines...the Windows XP Professional x64 box stayed on Kaspersky despite my misgivings until I upgraded it to Windows 7 because Microsoft did not port its anti-virus to that platform.

Spyware is often the basis for free software. Adobe Reader and Google Chrome and the Ask toolbar that shipped with Java are pretty obvious examples.
My best article yet has 5 recommends
That's fair. But I guess I think of it as a somewhat continuous transition from human to machine manufacturing. Yes, currently manufacturing uses lots of humans, but that is changing, and the pace of change has not, AFAIK, reached any plateau.

What I think matters, is where we are going, not where we are. You give China as evidence of the human dominated state of manufacturing. I give it as evidence of the shift toward robot dominated manufacturing: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601215/china-is-building-...
We/the media really should have picked a word other than "smart" for these devices.
That doesn't seem quite right. C extensions can release the GIL and still continue running. So long as they are not operating on Python objects directly it is safe.
> But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?

Quotas are not the answer, period. It's not okay to deny someone a job to correct for some possible, unmeasured, inaccurate judgement call on another person based on a stereotype whether or not that stereotype is accurate across populations. All you're doing is transferring the injustice to another person. What you're doing is preferring certain victims of injustice based on race/gender/whatever, and transferring their injustice to some other race/gender/whatever.

Find another solution. Get creative. But subverting explicit meritocratic hiring to correct for unconfirmed but suspected implicit non-meritocratic hiring is unjust. And stupid.
The primary problem for many people (including kids) is motivation. Struggling, especially in the beginning, can be demotivating. It can even make people feel like they must be a failure or that the material "isn't for me".

Introducing basic programming visually then slowly transitioning into text should allow more learners to get over that hump and imagine themselves doing fun & interesting things. (Some kids will jump directly to more difficult tasks and eschew non-text immediately).

I don't think we have nearly enough evidence to say whether any of these kids will be "great. Not to be rude but your anecdotes aren't data either.
Not necessarily. If 20% of college grads are women and all your competitors have an "aggressive diversity programme" you'll be hard-pressed to get 20% female hires without an "aggressive diversity programme" of your own. They would be out-marketing you for female candidates.
The article was mostly about VC-Uber tug of war, though. That's the essential point of the whole debacle.
Be ashamed or worried about your own sins. You're not responsible for the sins of your father's father's father.
In what way are social justice causes authoritarian?
Edit: I agree that GP exaggerates but...

I have been paid very good money (north of USD 85000 in Norther Europe) for stuff that was mostly so simple I could easily taught a bright and reliable 16 y.o. to do it. (I did at a similar job.)
I really don't understand your position at all, sorry.

You agree with Damore that the underlying issue is interest, not capability.

You say that biological influences on this are "not compelling enough to convince you of anything". Fine, but you offer no alternative explanation for why men find coding more interesting than women. If you have no better explanation, then the scientific papers that do provide an explanation would seem to take precedence, no?

You agree that women are more likely to like dollhouses than boys as children. But you haven't noticed or don't see the connection between what girls play with as children (dolls of babies, people) and the dominance of primary school education by girls? To me the connection is obvious. Girls are more interested in such jobs.

Finally, you say memos like Damore's are controversial if they're used to affect company policy because the problem it addresses is abstract and with many factors going into it. But this is not sufficient to make a memo controversial. Executives write memos on abstract and multi-faceted topics every day: the nature of the digital revolution, how best to motivate their workforce, etc. These memos are all designed to influence company policy around abstract topics.

So what you really mean when you say that Damore's memo is inappropriate for a workplace to be "going there" is that you wish to ban discussion of any gender diversity policies that are not Google's existing diversity policies. These policies are extreme, quite likely illegal and at the very least unfair to men.

This is why I described your views as extreme feminist. I know it won't seem that way to you, but feeling that nobody should even be allowed to voice disagreement to diversity policies - not even by citing science - simply because you feel it's "inappropriate"? That is to me an extremist position. It is the embodiment of intolerance.
The blog pushes two potential outcome, but fails to realize a third - Benchmark, as one of the most successful VC firms ever, is messaging to CEOs that certain behavior will not be tolerated, even if they are going to be the next Google and Facebook.
I personally believe including "cultural fit" in hiring decisions is introducing massive amounts of bias, almost by definition.

Aptitude can be figured out by something as simple as SAT or GMAT scores. If universities use those test scores, why shouldn't employers?

Skill level is determined by doing tasks very similar to the ones that will be given at the job. You know, like reversing red / black binary trees in memory. ;p
> breaking

This preprint "implies P not equal NP".
I can't tell you how happy I was to see your comment at the top of this discussion.

Relevant: "Python is Only Slow If You Use it Wrong"
http://apenwarr.ca/diary/2011-10-pycodeconf-apenwarr.pdf
They being the domain registrar (edit thx betafive) for the domain (they already didn't host the content). Also, this followed hacking and threats:

...

(CNN)The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi website, needs to find another domain name provider after GoDaddy gave it the boot following a derogatory story about the woman killed at the Charlottesville, Virginia, rally.

The site, which calls itself "The World's Most Genocidal Republican Website," registered its name with GoDaddy -- but GoDaddy doesn't host the Daily Stormer's content.

...

(Guardian)A message purportedly posted by hackers has appeared on the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, saying the site has been taken over in response to an article criticising a woman who died during violence at far-right rally in Virginia over the weekend.

...

What I'm curious about is Google. Are they providing hosting and domain serving for anybody (even unpopular speech)? Where does content go when companies refuse to work with publishers?
Yes but then it would be for other programmers for computers. Or for other programmers for other programmers for computers. Better to say its for computers :)
The brief quote in the article has left the wrong impression, I think. I don't think the goal is to get a precise value of an arbitrary metric as an end in itself.

I think the science here is that there is (1) an optically measurable (latitude-dependent) rotation rate of top-of-atmopshere gas; (2) a magnetically measurable rotation rate (and axis) of subsurface conductive hydrogen; and (3) gravimetrically measurable rotation and density.

The close approaches of Cassini to Saturn will allow much better gravimetric measurements. It's surprising what can be pulled out of gravimetric techniques, see, e.g., https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/gravity-recovery-and-clima....

They would like to compare these measurements to get insight about the interior composition of the planet. For a bit more, see this old overview:

https://futurism.com/new-spin-saturns-rotational-period/

and

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7255/full/460582a...

*

It may be surprising, but groups have been working on general circulation models (GCM) for outer planet atmospheres for over a decade, and the state of the art is pretty advanced. (A good recent presentation with lots of nice plots: https://theoryofclimate.sciencesconf.org/conference/theoryof...)
The top-of-atmosphere rotational velocities would be a major constraint on models like these.
Kind of like proving that you can't solve the halting problem, it lets us put to rest the idea that you can reduce the complexity of NP problems to a deterministic polynomial solution. The collective brainpower can be used to solve other problems.